Eleanor Bergstein's 1989 Novel "Ex-Lover"

Two years after the release of the movie Dirty Dancing, Random House published her novel Ex-Lover.

The website Kirkus Reviews summarizes the novel as follows:

... A grief-haunted playwright accepts a magazine assignment to visit a movie set, only to get entwined in the slow death of a lover and a grisly murder.

Jesse Gerard, a 33-year-old playwright consumed by thoughts of death, walks onto a bustling movie set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, thinking it will be just the task to plunge her back into life. In the past year, the cerebral Jesse has lost her mother, her father, and her best friend, so she plans to weave together a quirky, on-the-scene magazine piece that is suffused with the benign good humor of one who has suffered much. After all, she is an emotionally scarred survivor writing about a movie that is about a survivor (a woman haunted by her mother's concentration camp ordeal) -- except that the movie stars the notoriously superficial Sylvie.

Jesse's introspective approach to her project almost shatters on the day she impulsively pushes a rolling gurney off its tracks, seriously injuring a stunt woman. But Jesse completely suppresses her role in the ""accident,"" concentrating instead on her burgeoning love affair with the magnetic director of photography.

Despite her own happy marriage, Jesse obsesses about this golden-haired young man -- even befriending his young production-assistant girlfriend to learn more about her lover.

In between assignations, she also grows closer to Sylvie, seeing more and more similarities between the star and herself. When Jesse learns her lover has cancer and only a few months to live, however, her passionate idyll turns into a weird and confusing journey into evil and illusion -- ending in an arbitrary and gruesome murder.

An enormously convoluted and indulgent book. Bergstein seems to mean this as a kind of meditation on the arbitrary nature of death, but her fragmentary, subjective approach, instead of deftness, has the sloppy feel of a rough draft, full of holes. A definite pass.

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Julia Cameron reviewed the novel for The Los Angeles Times as follows:

... Bergstein's heroine is Jessie Gerard, a "Playwright's Horizon playwright," who is happily married to Sam, an engineer. Jessie has recently suffered a number of losses -- a rash of family deaths, the loss of a best friend to suicide, and the loss of her own creativity to writer's block. In an attempt at recovery, she has undertaken an assignment "for the worst magazine I read cover to cover."

She thinks she's slumming.

Her assignment is to cover a movie being shot on the streets of Manhattan. She covers more than that.

Midway through the shoot, she takes a lover, the ex-lover of the title. He's got a fatal disease and she's got a fatal attraction. When a certain someone is found hacked to pieces, the phrase, "He's to die for" takes on a literal ring. We've got a plethora of suspects -- among them the soon-to-be ex-lover.

Given her killer prose, the playwright-heroine is not exactly above suspicion, either. After all, she does fantasize about her husband, ". . . with a sudden bite, crunch, could tear, destroy him. . . ."

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The Amazon website reviewed the novel as follows:

.... [Bergstein] has captured the world of movie-making as seen through the eyes of a 33-year-old playwright. Blocked and drained by a series of devastating personal losses, Jesse has taken a magazine assignment to write about a New York movie on location. She is soon swept up in the pulse and crazy energy of production, and her narrative races along with witty and precise observations of the cast of characters and the reality/unreality of film-making.

An adulterous affair with the young director of photography moves Jesse into intimate connections with the crew and cast, including the movie's star, whom Jessie has always resembled. (The affair is secret, but affects deeply Jessie's perceptions.)

Then there is a shocking murder. Jessie's suspense-filled narrative unspools the rest of the story.

Bergstein's writing is deft, controlled and perfectly matched to her narrator's tone. Not since Terry Southern's savagely funny Blue Movie, which this novel resembles in several ways, has any writer made such extravagant good use of the rich material of a film production. This is a striking story about life and death, good and evil, sanity and insanity. And Bergstein has the good judgment to aim just high enough that it all works.

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