The Full Catastrophe — Daniel Paisner

The world is too much with Terence Bander, a once larger-than-life Hollywood icon, who worries his best years are behind him, and that the very stuff of those years (his kids, his ex-wives, his agent, the downward course of his no longer legendary career) is conspiring against him.

The world is not nearly enough with Alex Pimletz, a going-nowhere obituary writer for the Boston Record-Transcript, who worries his life has passed him by, and that he will never be caught in the same currents that move everyone else.

Bander, on an impulse, guides his car off a cliff along the Maine coast, hoping to emerge from his presumed death a richer man with no money or prospects but at least a bottomless serving of possibility. Pimletz, on a whim, is hired to complete the "fallen" icon's memoirs, and the assignment emerges as his first piece of possibility in a long while.

The Full Catastrophe, the darkly funny second novel from New York Times best-selling author Daniel Paisner, mines the rich territory between hope and despair, fame and infamy, whim and recklessness. In the hands of one of the more prominent "ghost-writers" in publishing, The Full Catastrophe offers pointed note-and-comment on the merchandising of our movie stars, politicians and business leaders, and the vagaries of our popular culture.