A Way of Life, Like Any Other

By Darcy O'Brien
Introduction by Seamus Heaney

The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents' careers have crashed since then, and their marriage has broken up too.

Lovesick and sex-crazed, the mother sets out on an intercontinental quest for the right—or wrong—man, while her mild-mannered but manipulative former husband clings to his memories in California. And their teenage son? How he struggles both to keep faith with his family and to get by himself, and what in the end he must do to break free, makes for a classic coming-of-age story—a novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Brilliant, moving, funny, buy at once.
— Time Out

[A] little gem of a novel...a masterwork of Hollywood fiction.
— Salon

A hysterically funny coming-of-age story set in Hollywood in the '40s ... a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation.
— GQ

O'Brien balances boyish innocence with a very adult perspective on human foibles—the result is scathingly funny and nearly impossible to put down.
— Publishers Weekly

How is it that this minor comic masterpiece could ever have gone out of print? Darcy O'Brien's 1977 novel (now republished by New York Review Books, to which all praise) takes us into an alien culture, Hollywood in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and evokes that kitschy world with spectacularly deadpan humor.
— Michael Dirda, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1, 2001

A hilarious addition to the fabulous Hollywood novel, this time laconic, understated, deadpan, ruthlessly cutting from scene to scene and character to character, and both witty and moving. I enjoyed it enormously, and recommend it unreservedly as a funny, serious, literate, and intelligent book.
— The Guardian

Darcy O'Brien grew up in Beverly Hills in the 1940s and '50s, the son of Hollywood stars in their days of glory and sunset. He wrote one of the very best novels ever to come out of that world. A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a triumphant miracle of style, with a narrator at once deadly and compassionate, capable of farce and heartbreak, lyricism and irony. He tells us how to live in such a life, or at least how he did, and how to emerge from it ready for anything.
— Thomas Flanagan

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.