Arts & Entertainments

Book excerpt: A drama teacher finds unlikely celebrity thanks to a nearly forgotten sex tape in this ingenious . . . entertaining and thought provoking” novel (Booklist). At thirty-three, Eddie Hartley has given up his dream of becoming an actor for the reality of life as a drama teacher at a boys’ prep school. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it is one disappointment too many. Weighted down with debt, his wife’s mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. Overcoming his initial moral qualms, Eddie figures that in an era when any publicity is good publicity, the tape won’t cause any harm—a decision that will propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved. A hilariously biting and incisive take-down of our culture’s monstrous obsessio n with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man’s belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.