Jezebel’s January Book Club Pick: ‘Television’ by Lauren Rothery

The central conceit of Television, the debut novel from filmmaker and writer Lauren Rothery, is clear from the back blurb, so I’m not spoiling anything by sharing it: Verity is a 50-ish-year-old movie star—the type making $30 million plus per movie—who’s lost all love for the industry, and announces a lottery of his salary plus points (that is, his share of the movie’s in-theater profits) for his latest Marvel-esque movie. The lottery incidentally makes the movie a huge box office hit, giving Verity more leverage in the negotiations for the next installment of the series, which he uses in part to demand a better script. 

“I’ll give [the studio] three weeks to get organized. Then I’ll read two scripts a week for three weeks. If they can’t give me one good script in that time frame I’m out,” he tells his team over lunch.

“Where are they supposed to find six workable scripts in a month and a half?” one member asks. “Tell them to try Hollywood,” Verity responds.

The lunch scene exemplifies the novel’s stylistic dialogue (though it risks occasionally being too quippy, nearly every character’s work revolves around words—either writing or performing them—so universal linguistic dexterity feels fairly natural), and its perspective: The movie industry is dying, and the creative people who could revive it are the last people given the opportunity to do so. 

This is explored through multiple narrators: Verity; his best friend and sometimes lover, Helen, who has been writing plays and films for nearly three decades but makes her scratch reading and punching up scripts for more famous people; and Phoebe, an entirely unrelated, as-yet-unsuccessful screenwriter. (Phoebe’s connection to Verity and Helen is revealed at the end in a poignant twist.)

At this point, Verity’s success is mostly due to inertia and his extremely handsome face. (His handsomeness is mentioned many times, and he is also, supposedly, actually good at acting. I picture a George Clooney type.) Helen makes enough to be comfortable, but is not creatively fulfilled, and is also insulated by her proximity to Verity’s extreme wealth. Phoebe is the closest we get to a struggling, if practical, artist—she dreams about having enough money to invest that she could live off the interest while writing—who also frequently doubts her own abilities. (“I typed NOTE: BIT SHIT. COME BACK TO WHEN A BETTER WRITER.”)

The novel is told in short chapters, rotating through these three characters’ narrations, which starkly contrasts the differences in their material situations. If there is a solution to this difference, the novel appears to argue that it is pure and simple luck. Talent matters, but not as much as one might hope. 

Which brings us back to the lottery. The winner is “some asshole in Tucson who thinks, now, that his whole life was leading up to becoming a multimillionaire,” as Verity muses dismissively. The winner’s identity is irrelevant to the novel; rather, it is the lottery itself that’s key to the underlying tension of the story. It is a symptom of the fact that Verity is, at the very least, loosening his grip on reality, and his narration becomes more hectic and less conscious of conventions like complete sentences as the novel goes on. This does not come across as particularly dark, though. It’s the midlife crisis of a man whose status means he can drunkenly embarrass himself in public with no consequences; who has more money than he could possibly ever need; and who is increasingly irritated with the games he has to play to maintain both.

A more conventional novel might lean more heavily into the bleak clichés that Verity’s persona—or Helen’s stalled creative ambitions, or Phoebe’s failure to launch—evokes, but Television merely quietly, cheekily observes them, and Rothery ultimately gives us a bit of a happy ending. (And yes, there’s a slightly too earnest reason why it’s called Television and not The Movies, but I’ll leave that up to you to find out.) 

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