Killing men softly

>> Owen Whittaker’s A Little Trouper pits a loser actor against a cold-blooded little creep

by JULIET WATERS

Hal Morrissey, a 40-year-old actor who laments the days when he used to play characters “on heroin, not Viagra” decides after a particularly humiliating audition for a beer commercial that he’s finally going to quit acting. Except the next day he gets his big break. One of the lead actors in the BBC’s most popular sitcom, Bringing up Ralph, has committed suicide. Hal gets the role of father to six-year-old Ralph, played by Sebastian Taylor, a child actor so adored he’s been nicknamed “The Nation’s Poppet.”
When Sebastian’s hot single mum, Jessica, a Nicole Kidman look-a-like, starts falling in love with Hal, everything seems perfect. Until Hal realizes that Sebastian’s not the type of kid who’s ever going to warm to Hal as a father figure or a mentor. And he’s definitely not the kind of kid to join him in a duet of “Killing Me Softly.” Sebastian’s more the type of cold-blooded little creep to be doing the killing. Soon, the circumstances surrounding the death of the last actor who played Sebastian’s father are looking suspicious.

A Little Trouper by Owen Whittaker is not About a Boy. This is not another story about a man/child who can only find his maturity by being forced into fatherhood or mentorhood. And Hal doesn’t end up with the hot single mum. He ends up with his best friend, Belinda, a deceptively dowdy psychiatrist (a plot twist I’m not giving away since it’s obvious from the beginning they’ll end up together). Actually the more one gets to know Hal, the more one realizes that his problem isn’t actually immaturity. It’s his career.

For the most part, A Little Trouper is a light, easy page-turner that’s part romantic comedy and part thriller. Its greatest strength, however, is a few unexpected scenes where Whittaker poignantly captures the desperation and pathos of the actor’s life. Hal’s friend and mentor Jake, who is now at the end of his career with only extreme poverty and loneliness to show for it, stands as a scary example of what Hal is risking.

Whittaker has a fair amount of experience to draw from. He and his wife, novelist Lucinda Edmonds, were both successful actors during the ’80s. Then the recession hit, acting work dried up and Edmonds fell ill. Faced with losing their house, Edmonds penned her first novel during her recovery and scored a six-figure book deal. For tax reasons they moved from England to Ireland, where Whittaker was unable to sustain his acting career. The couple had two children. As her literary career blossomed, and his acting career died, he slowly discovered himself becoming a househusband. This was not a role he chose as part of a lifestyle revolution. He describes it as “a sort of legalized and politically correct form of castration.”

He managed to turn his experience into his own successful novel, The House Husband. Now Whittaker’s become something of an antidote to the self-styled New Man. There’s no confusing failure with getting in touch with one’s feminine nature in his work. His characters are losers, not liberators. But they’re also not Nick Hornby’s slacker narcissists, who skip from relationship to relationship until they suddenly, and improbably, mature. Whittaker’s characters are, very recognizably, adults.

Hal starts the novel making a mature decision, to quit a profession that, given his talent and training, he had good reason to pursue. But the society he lives in is slow to reward talent and training, and quick to reward immaturity and grandiosity. Whittaker makes an honourable attempt at satirizing the role reversal of vulnerable adult and cold-blooded kid. Unfortunately-and this is a big unfortunately-the book isn’t especially funny. Yet what it lacks in humour, it manages to make up for in charm and vision. And though the thriller plot line is entirely improbable, the hero at least isn’t. :
A Little Trouper by Owen Whittaker, Orion, pb, 244pp, $24.95