The year is 2002 and Hector Singh, an aspiring screenwriter in his late 20s, has moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams. He is mixed Indian and Puerto Rican, though he considers himself post-race – after all, it’s a meritocracy, isn’t it? Hector has written his own scripts but gets put to work as a writers’ assistant on a bland TV drama, Coming Holm, about a white woman trying to get her life back together by running for mayor in her washed-up home town. He is also dealing with his mother’s sudden death but he pushes the grief aside to not only survive but thrive in Hollywood.
Sydney-based US expat Nick Bhasin’s ambitious debut novel, I Look Forward to Hearing from You, is a madcap satire of the screen industry and the very act of writing, from inflated egos to the messy politics of the workplace. It’s a distinctive and daring piece of work but, while it has moments of pathos and brilliance, the novel more often is swallowed by its own snark.
Each chapter begins with a fake quote from a celebrity or notable writer: “The life of a writer is pure torture,” from the pen of Judy Blume. Or “What is success? Is it fame? Is it wealth? Yes.” from Clint Eastwood. These pithy snippets recall the #TheySaidWHAT series on Clickhole – in fact it all feels very now, including conversations about diversity, body positivity and appropriation, which makes the fact it is set in the early-aughts seem unconvincing.
Celebrity and pop culture are mercilessly skewered, sometimes in wickedly funny ways: Eminem sings a song for a film called Hip Hop Hobo; Angelina Jolie stars in I, Refugee. Bhasin – who has worked in film and TV production in the US – has concocted perhaps hundreds of fake films, TV shows and loglines, often taking aim at the shallowness of the industry. (Speaking about a show called My One Black Friend, a character muses, “Black people really don’t like My One Black Friend. White people? They love it.”) He clearly has a deep knowledge and begrudging love for pop culture, but the effect of this unyielding avalanche of satirical references is that their impact gradually dulls, and it eventually becomes more grating than humorous.
Bhasin’s brand of satire recalls another Australian debut, Siang Lu’s excellent 2022 novel The Whitewash, which took the form of an oral history about the rise and fall of a fictional Asian-led film in Hollywood. Both novels blend fact and fiction to create hyperreal parallel universes that reveal the industry’s complicity in perpetuating white supremacy.
But Bhasin takes that surrealism to another level. Hector’s reliance on antidepressants blurs the lines between reality and his increasingly manic imagination, exacerbated by an absurd coyote infestation in the city and his imaginary primate friend – a literal monkey on his back. The protagonist’s professional and interpersonal relationships become more unhinged as the narrative unfolds and he unravels.
When Bhasin does bring in actual reality, it is to illustrate what is probably already obvious to the reader. Reflections about real-life actors such as Raquel Welch and Rita Hayworth, who anglicised their names to make it in Hollywood, drive Hector to slowly accept that being post-race isn’t possible in a world where race very much still dictates people’s lives and opportunities. His experiences in the workplace, where he is subject to constant racism, eventually wear him down.
One of Hector’s maladaptive coping mechanisms is binge eating, which couples with intrusive thoughts. He is faced by two opposing groups – Fat Acceptance and Fat Panic – rallying for body liberation and espousing fatphobic beliefs, respectively. These two sides represent the character’s battle with internalised fatphobia (Bhasin has written in the past about his own struggles with body image) but it’s the latter that win out most often in this novel, as Hector expresses constant revulsion at what he perceives to be the grotesqueness of his body – which is really just described as being large.
While it provides an honest window into the character’s self-loathing, and his perception of weight gain as a personal moral failing, Bhasin’s relentless negative physical descriptions do begin to feel gratuitous. Hector refers to himself as a “hippo”; looking in the mirror at his fat moving, he reflects that it’s “one of the most hideous things I had ever seen in my life”. At another point, he thinks, “I’d rather have had fucking hands for feet and feet for hands than jiggly titties.” Similar to the onslaught of jokey references, more restraint would have communicated the character’s struggle just as effectively, without veering into potentially harmful or triggering territory.
Scenes detailing Hector’s grief are the novel’s strongest points – a moment in which he discovers his mother’s secret ambitions and love for film is profoundly moving, revealing a side of her he had never known or had access to, due to the expectations of immigrant mothers to put their dreams aside. Hector dials his dead mother’s number just to hear her voicemail.
In these moments, the character’s deep sorrow is fully rendered and he becomes much more real and sympathetic; Bhasin’s narrative voice softens enough to let the reader into the true heart of the story, which stands in contrast to the acidic tone of the rest of the book. While the latter illustrates the self-defensive mechanisms necessary to survive as a minority in the cut-throat film world, a greater balance in tone would have made for a more satisfying arc.
Hector is a strange and unreliable narrator but, when Bhasin lets the character’s emotional walls down, there’s a fragile, beautiful sense of humanity underneath. More often, though, the satire and self-defence is laid on so thick that it’s almost suffocating. Welcome to Hollywood.
I Look Forward to Hearing from You by Nick Bhasin is out now through Penguin
