You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

From the Publisher

Anne Rosenbaum leads a life of quiet Los Angeles privilege, the wife of Hollywood executive Howard Rosenbaum and mother of their seventeen-year-old son, Sam. Years ago Anne and Howard met studying literature at Columbia—she, the daughter of a British diplomat from London, he a boy from an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Now on sleek blue California evenings, Anne attends halogen-lit movie premieres on the arm of her powerful husband. But her private life is lived in the world of her garden, reading books.

When one of Howard's friends, the head of a studio, asks Anne to make a reading list, she casually agrees—though, as a director reminds her, "no one reads in Hollywood." To her surprise, they begin calling: screen-writers; producers, from their bungalows; and agents, from their plush offices on Wilshire and Beverly. Soon Anne finds herself leading an exclusive book club for the industry elite. Emerging gradually from her seclusion, she guides her readers into the ideas and beauties of Donne, Yeats, Auden, and Mamet, with her brilliant and increasingly bold opinions. But when a crisis of identity unexpectedly turns an anguished Howard back toward the Orthodoxy he left behind as a young man, Anne must set out to save what she values above all else: her husband's love.

At once fiercely intelligent and emotionally grip-ping, You or Someone Like You confronts the fault lines between inherited faith and personal creed, and, through the surprising transformation of one exceptional, unforgettable woman, illuminates literature's power to change our lives.

Publishers Weekly

With this academia-obsessed novel, New York Times perfume critic Burr branches out from his nonfiction scent-based books. Howard Rosenbaum is a Jewish powerhouse in Hollywood with an Anglo-Saxon wife, Anne, whom he met at Columbia University, where they both earned Ph.D.s in literature. Now they live among "pathologically narcissistic" people with an "utter disdain for the written word." But when narrator Anne is solicited to compile a book list for Dreamworks CEO Stacey Snider (Burr weaves actual Hollywood bigwigs into the tale), the list becomes a small book club, then morphs into a huge gathering with Anne the literary guru to virtually all of Hollywood. Anne and Howard's only child, Sam, travels to Israel, and Howard's initial delight sours when Sam is rejected by a rabbi in Jerusalem for an intensive study "program" because he is not officially Jewish and therefore "unclean." A true celebration of intellect, Burr's tale does, occasionally, misstep into a pedantic bog, but ultimately examines the personal decision each of us must make to run from, or embrace, our identity. (June)

Sheila Riley - Library Journal

A love story rolled up in literature lessons makes New York Times scent critic Burr's (The Emperor of Scent) fiction debut a truly novel work. The narrator is the incandescent, opinionated, very well read, and professorial Anne. Born in England, the child of diplomats, Anne marries the Brooklyn-born and equally erudite Howard Rosenbaum, and they produce a very precocious son, Samuel. Anne's natural sense of otherness, heightened by her Jewish in-laws' lack of enthusiasm at their marriage, is further stretched when Howard accepts a studio executive position and moves the family to Los Angeles. Anne struggles to find a niche for herself, finally meeting success the moment she sets up a book club at the behest of a couple of Howard's colleagues. Anne's brilliance in running this salon fuels Hollywood's boundless hunger for the next great screenplay. Soon Anne is dividing her book readers by film industry types, multiplying the number of groups, and her business is born. What of the love story? The differences of faith between Anne and Howard surface after their son returns from a trip to Israel, and Anne must work her literary magic to retrieve their love. If only for the lessons in linguistics and literature, this is recommended for all fiction collections.

Kirkus Reviews

In this fiction debut, journalist Burr (The Perfect Scent, 2008, etc.) offers the tale of a movie executive's wife leading a book-discussion group. Anne Hammersmith met Howard Rosenbaum at Columbia University, where they both received their doctorates in English literature. Soon after graduation he got an opportunity to produce movies in Hollywood, and after negotiating some difficult fertility issues, they had a son, Sam. Eventually Anne is able to indulge her love for literature in an unusual way, by starting a book club for people in the movie industry. This would seem to be an uphill battle, for even though the air is full of talk about scripts, as one of Howard's acquaintances informs Anne, "Nobody reads in Hollywood." Anne is one of those people able to discern literature's connections to her own life, so the books she chooses for the discussion group serve as a commentary on her family relationships and social position. Tolstoy on dinner parties (in Anna Karenina), Auden on "namelessness" and identity in the modern age, George Eliot on anti-Semitism and what to do with one's life (in Romola) all elucidate Anne's increasingly frayed social and domestic bonds. Sam, a preternaturally precocious boy who grew up doting on the clever wordplay and allusions of his literary parents, as a teenager reveals that he's gay, but also becomes increasingly interested in the religious heritage of his father. Howard, previously a thoroughly secular Jew, begins to move toward orthodoxy, which both hurts and frustrates Anne. The religious divisions Howard erects are barriers to their marriage, she contends: "If you are now a Jew and I am now a Gentile, you have now placed me in a fundamentallydifferent category of human beings from yours. We are divided."A savvy novel that deals with Hollywood from a cultural rather than a tabloid perspective. Author tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C. Agent: Eric Simonoff/Janklow & Nesbit

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