John Gregory Dunne Books

Franklin Library John Gregory Dunne books:
The Red, White and Blue - signed first edition - 1987
Playland - signed first edition - 1994

 

 

The Red, White and Blue
A profile of the Brodericks, an enormously wealthy San Francisco family, this novel chronicles the lives of Jack, a reporter on his father's newspaper; patriarch Hugh; Jack's brother Bro, an eminent priest; and Jack's dynamic lawyer ex-wife Leah.

The title suggests the poster-paint colors with which Dunne portrays America in the last quarter-century. Let red stand for Leah Kaye, radical feminist lawyer; white, for Benedictine Father "Bro" Broderick, trendy celebrity priest; and blue, for long-suffering ex-husband and brother, Jack Broderick, "a successful failure" as a writer. The pilgrimages of the former two take them from the execution of a black radical through elections in a Latin American country to their murder by "a human time bomb" Vietnam veteran. Only then does Jack briefly awaken from his "passion for the vicarious." The novel aspires to the acerbic nihilism of Ambrose Bierce, from whom its epigraph, but contents itself with knocking down straw men, the opportunistic leading the naive on behalf of the unworthy in an essentially static portrait in black.


Playland
A critically acclaimed best-seller set in the glamorous, gangster-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s tells the story of Blue Tyler, a child star who disappears from Hollywood and becomes a bag lady in New York City.