The Yippie Ki-Yay Years

If William Stadiem's "Moneywood" were a movie script, the producers would be howling for a rewrite. The book has no plot, its characters wander in and out of the frame without being properly introduced, and you can forget any idea of a classical three-act structure. You turn the pages waiting for the action to start, but all you get is pileups of proper nouns, like this putative description of a movie producer's wife: "She had been living the fast life on the Hollywood circuit, having been one of Gloria Vanderbilt's bridesmaids at her eyebrow-raising wedding to Hollywood agent-stud Pat DiCicco, who had a second, darker life as the right hand/black hand of supermobster Lucky Luciano." Read in isolation, a clause-clouded sentence like that is just about navigable. Surround it with a thousand other such convolutions, and you end up with a forest of paperwork so dense that not even John Rambo could machete his way through it.