Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 10, 2013

Christine Sneed’s impressive debut novel, “Little Known Facts,” is a Hollywood tale that aspires to complicate the traditional Hollywood narrative. Its characters want to swap sincerity for surface, real anxiety for contrived problems. But these dream-factory occupants, Sneed suggests, have a hard time telling one from the other.

At the novel’s core is Renn Ivins, an aging yet still virile actor-director who’s making a play for an Oscar with a film about post-Katrina New Orleans. His celebrity is a kind of human tractor beam: He’s “an institution, a movement, a cult with numerous irrational adherents,” as one of his ex-wives puts it. Shifting among different voices in Renn’s life, Sneed constructs a kind of cubist portrait of the man. For Renn’s daughter, he’s a model for her own ill-advised romances. For the Katrina film’s female lead, he’s a romantic dream. To another ex-wife, he’s a preening narcissist. And for his son, Will, the novel’s emotional center, he’s what keeps him from pursuing anything ambitious, lest he fall short of dad’s glory.

“His main goal each day is to resist inertia,” Sneed writes of Will, and the plot of the novel is largely about his efforts to generate his own forward momentum. He drifts from working with dad on-set to making an adolescent play for dad’s girlfriend to running off to Paris to distance himself from Renn’s ­impossibly large shadow.

No cataclysmic surprises spill out of that effort: Sneed’s prose is clean and dry as L.A. air, unadorned and disinterested in musical effects. The book thrives instead on Sneed’s skill at conjuring multiple voices. Each of its 11 chapters focuses on a different character, and Sneed is remarkably attuned to the way each person postures to present him- or herself in the best possible light. An excerpt from wife No. 2’s memoir encapsulates the tell-don’t-show style of Hollywood gossip, while Will’s chapters evoke the subtle pleading and self-pity of a rudderless man. Renn himself is bare-chested, arrogant and guilt-ridden: He confesses that he keeps two journals, like a corrupt bookkeeper.

“I wonder this — if you don’t have to struggle, why would you?” Will’s mother and Renn’s first wife asks. Money isn’t a concern for any of the people in this novel, but they’re unstable regardless. “Little Known Facts” is a kind of romance novel — Topic A for everybody is where their lusts and affections are best served. But there’s little contrived sweetness in this book, just a recognition that the Hollywood glamour that was supposed to make everything easy in fact made everything harder.

Mark Athitakis is a reviewer based in Washington, D.C. He blogs at markathitakis.com.

Booklist, Oct. 15, 2012, "Spotlight on Debut Novels" Issue

(Starred Review. Little Known Facts): In his silvered fifties, Renn Ivins extends his reign as a Hollywood sex symbol, adding screenwriting and directing to his accomplishments. Twice-divorced, he also embarks on a closely observed relationship with his movie’s ambitious star, Elise, who is younger than his two children, Will and Anna. Sneed follows her award-winning short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (2010), with an ensnaring first novel that delves into the complex challenges and anguish of living with and in the shadow of celebrity. Sneed’s wit, curiosity, empathy, and ability to divine the perfect detail propel this psychologically exquisite, superbly realized novel of intriguing, caricature-transcending characters and predicaments. Lost-soul Will knows he “should be happy,” but instead he is adrift and angry. A medical student emulating her steadfast pediatrician mother, the novel’s moral center, Anna seems immune from the toxins of family notoriety until an untenable love affair exposes her vulnerability. As Sneed illuminates each facet of her percussively choreographed plot via delectably slant disclosures––overheard conversations, snooping, tabloids, confessions under duress, and journal entries, among them—she spotlights “little known facts” about the cost of fame, our erotic obsession with movie-star power, and where joy can be found.— Donna Seaman

GQ UK

On page p. 52, January 2013 issue:

Three hip-lit debuts and the writers they remind us of (with reviews of Amanda Coplin's The Orchardist and Gavin Extence's The Universe Versus Alex Woods):

"Jennifer Egan's meta-fiction; Richard Ford's Americana; Daniel Kehlmann's preoccupations":

Little Known Facts

by Christine Sneed

What it's about: The children of a famous film star, wrestling to define their lives away from the pull of Los Angeles glitz.  As they do so, layers of family intrigue unwrap around them.

Kirkus Reviews

www.kirkusreviews.com

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS
Author: Sneed, Christine

Review Issue Date: November 1, 2012
Online Publish Date: October 11, 2012
Publisher:Bloomsbury
Pages: 304
Price ( Hardcover ): $25.00
Publication Date: February 12, 2013
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-1-60819-958-7
Category: Fiction

Sneed’s debut novel, which follows a short story collection (Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, 2010), goes beyond the tabloid headlines and chronicles the lives of those who orbit a famous actor.

Celebrity has its perks as well as its drawbacks, and revered movie icon Renn Ivins’ life is no exception. Adored by fans throughout the world, those closest to him also are affected by his aura and not necessarily in a positive way. His earnings provide financial security for his children, ex-wives, family members and girlfriends, but Ivins’ fame is a double-edged sword. Both of Ivins’ adult children become involved with lovers who secretly thrill at the chance to be connected to his inner circle. Will, his son, coasts through life engulfed in a sea of contradicting emotions. He loves Ivins and inwardly strives to please him, but he also resents his father’s interference and feels as if he will never measure up to his expectations, so he compensates in other not-so-healthy ways. At the same time, although he despises himself for it, he uses his father’s name to impress others. Anna, Will’s sister, is a brilliant but naïve medical student who rationalizes her questionable choices and has more in common with her father than she realizes. Time has more or less softened Ivins’ first wife’s attitude toward him. A successful pediatrician who has lived a solitary life since their divorce 15 years earlier, she still watches all of his movies. And then there’s Ivins himself. Fodder for a bitter second wife’s book and a boon for his much younger girlfriend’s career, this author of two journals—one for posterity, the other more personal and destroyed each year—knows the allure of his public persona. It’s what he cultivates when he donates to charities and signs autographs. And it’s much easier on the ego to believe his own press.

Sneed effectively blurs the line between fact and fiction and brings each character to life.



Portraits of a Few...Rain Taxi Review, Spring 2011

Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry

University of Massachusetts Press. November 2010

Winner of The Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, 2009 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Awards Series

 

In Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, Christine Sneed’s talent for creating compelling stories and vivid characters suggests V.S. Pritchett being channeled by Elizabeth McCracken, and one wonders how this extraordinarily accomplished collection of stories could be her first. But Sneed has not exactly sprung from nowhere—her short stories and poems have been appearing in prominent journals since the mid-90s. 

“Quality of Life,” which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008, is the opening story of the collection, and in its creepy depiction of the process by which a young woman becomes a rich, older man’s concubine, leans toward fable. The last story in the collection, “Walled City” decidedly is a fable about a city in which the consensual restriction of citizens’ behavior is taken to absurd extremes. All the stories in between are straightforwardly realistic, but these two sets of circumstances—unconventional romantic relationships and prohibitive social conditions—are the contexts in which all of them take place; the locations are often Chicago and smaller Midwestern cities. 

Propelled by mixed motivations, the complexity of Sneed’s characters is matched by the complexity of thought, mood and voice in Portraits. In “By the Way,” our narrator muses, “Something not everyone seems to realize is that the worst thing about getting older is that so many people will always be younger than you.” (p.65) This kind of thoughtfulness is balanced with the kind of humor we see in “Walled City,” where, after conversation is outlawed, “few of the doctors having had the time to learn sign language… opted instead to begin writing legibly.” (p.152) This story, written with a detached, ironic formality, immediately follows the story “A Million Dollars,” narrated by the honest and vulnerable Thea, a teenaged waitress who speaks plainly and detests “smooth-talking scuzzballs.” (p.134) But like all of this collection’s protagonists, Thea is a deep well of empathy. Even in apparent danger of being taken advantage of by a cheesy photographer, she says, “No matter if he’s a serial killer. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, I guess. I’m just not mean enough to do something like that.” (p.133)

The empathetic impulse that guides these stories extends to Sneed’s treatment of her characters’ tormenting jealousies. Small-town Birdy and Cornell Schweitzer, in “You’re So Different,” invite Margaret—a screenwriter whom they have not seen since they were all in high school twenty years before—to lunch, during which it is revealed that they are both jealous of her. Cornell turns vicious and blurts that Margaret’s movies “are about sex.” (p.56) When she says that they’re about more than that, Cornell, seething with angry sarcasm, says, “Never fear… As long as you’re doing your thing, we’re safe from complete despair.” (p.57) In spite of their mortifyingly rude treatment of her, for long after she returns home, Margaret continues to worry about the Schweitzers, their opinions of her and her films, and has to resist an urge to call and check up on them. 

Through Sneed’s careful attention to her characters in this rich and varied collection, the reader lives briefly but sympathetically alongside people who challenge and change each other. The reward is the great one most of us hope for when we pick up a work of fiction—feeling moved. Toward the end of the story “You’re So Different,” Sneed adds the following final touches to her psychological portrait of Margaret, the screenwriter. “She has always yearned for romantic gestures, has always wanted to inspire them and knows she now sometimes does… She has worked for years for this, to be a stranger benignly affecting another, traveling across the invisible boundaries of time and circumstance.” (p.62) Ah, yes indeed, Ms. Sneed. 

 

 

—Justin Courter