Eros, Meet Thanatos

Ryan McIlvain reviews Samantha Allen’s “Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet.”

By Ryan McIlvainDecember 16, 2024

• Fiction

NEAR THE END of Samantha Allen’s new novel Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet, a memoirist who’s been moonlighting as a ghostwriter confides that he isn’t really an artist anymore, or anyway not the kind who’ll likely win a National Book Award. “I’m never going to be one of those waiflike, purple prose–writing authors who gets cover blurbs like ‘delicate and masterful’ or ‘a powerful meditation on X, Y, and Z.’”

It’s hard to tell if Adam Gallagher is being falsely modest here, not least because the book’s fade-out doesn’t let us in on the success or failure of future books under his name. We do get to read excerpts from the ghosted book Adam has been quickly but passionately at work on—an autobiography of a famous Hollywood action star named Roland Rogers, who happens to be dead at the time the work is commissioned, contracted, interviewed for, drafted, revised, and published. Rogers’s book is called The Truth, and his main aim in it is to come out of the closet at last. And, on the evidence of the few pages presented to us in a playful, moving coda, I’d say Adam the ghostwriter/editor has got moves, plenty of them.

Allen too, of course. In her previous novel—Patricia Wants to Cuddle (2022), a final-girl horror story featuring a female Sasquatch who doesn’t know her own strength—and now in this new novel about a ghostwriter who falls in love with a ghost, Allen shows a knack for setting up hooky plot premises that open up space to dream. And to wander, and observe, and, yes, meditate.

Not that Roland wears its meditations boringly on its sleeve—far from it. What Austenesque social commentary is present is simply an outgrowth of Adam’s fertile, funny brain—Adam, a “decidedly midlist writer,” he tells us, is underread and depressed. As the novel opens, he arrives at a hulking concrete mansion perched on the edge of a Malibu cliff: endless ocean off the patio, a garish Chihuly-sculpted chandelier in the entryway, etc. He has come to interview Rogers for the memoir Hollywood’s most bankable hunk has specifically requested Adam for—after he had read and loved Adam’s own coming-out tale of sorts, published a decade earlier to critical and popular acclaim. It was called Salt Lake City Sodomite.

Adam is introduced to Roland, who’s cagey and eccentric even for a celebrity (he’ll only speak to Adam through speakers positioned around the house), and we’re introduced to Adam’s mental habit of making a sort of director’s commentary on everything he sees, everything his intelligence catches on. “However this goes,” he thinks, “I’ll get to stay in one of the most luxurious homes in California rent-free, even if it looks like a single-story office park from the outside. Roland can cancel the contract, but he can’t retroactively lower the thread count of the sheets I’m going to sleep on tonight.”

Or, after fainting in one of the residence’s palatial rooms: “I sit up and take stock of my vertebrae. I am apparently still intact, not that Roland’s unforgiving flooring was any help in that regard. When did rich people turn on carpet?” It’s sharp, often witheringly funny stuff. Adam’s talent for noticing and thinking (and really, it’s Allen’s talent) is one of the chief pleasures of this deeply pleasurable book.

Once the chapters begin toggling between Adam’s and Roland’s perspectives, we learn how Roland died in a skiing accident, and how heaven (or some sort of in-between space) is real after all—news to Roland, and news to the ex-Mormon rationalist Adam too. What’s more, we get to enjoy Allen’s intelligence as it puts on a different brain. Here it is in one of the ghost-edited passages from Roland’s memoir:

I don’t know what will happen after this book hits shelves. People I trust told me not to write it. They were worried—like I used to be—that I’d lose fans, miss out on roles, and hurt my image. At first, I simply wanted to correct the record—to let you know that you all were wrong about me, that I had depths you never saw onscreen. But I realized that I was just trying to redirect your attention without revealing anything new. I still wanted to be a product, not a person: the same airbrushed set of abs with a fresh coat of paint on top.

At its best, Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet really is a series of powerful meditations on love, death, queerness, and ambition—not to mention Hollywood and Mormonism and other repressive systems. And all of it more or less smuggled into a sweet, clear Hallmark love story, if Hallmark love stories featured ghostly Mr. Darcys who haunt anal vibrators for their partner’s pleasure. When we’re in Roland’s floating perspective, we’re a little more on the laugh track, I think it’s fair to say, embodying our ghost so he can embody all the goofiness and earnestness and brooding regrets of the “three for them, one for me” actor, as Roland himself describes the bargain. “In ways,” he tells us, “I was the soul of America in human form. Adam can show everyone that the most challenging role I ever played was myself; that line could even go on the back cover, above the effusive blurbs.”

When Zoya, Roland’s ex-girlfriend and “beard,” as she calls herself, turns up in the final act, it’s another opportunity for Allen to poke fun at Hollywood and its brand of prosperity gospel. Zoya is a mononym whose PR team thought her pairing with the famous action star might be mutually beneficial for the people/brands involved. Years later now, she’s a social media influencer, a guru of self-actualization. When she learns that Roland is dead and in love with his ghostwriter, his physical body currently buried in a Utah snowdrift, she is unfazed. Phases and transformations in general appear not to bother Zoya, a person bracingly free of the purity complexes Adam and Roland lug around with them.

All the same, as Roland remarks, it’s been years since Zoya “stood next to a person who still has the face they were born with.” And her pressing concern now is that Roland’s coming-out memoir will cast her forever in the Great Man’s repressed shadow and spoil the launch of her line of sexual wellness products. Trouble looms.

¤

I have it on good authority that Patricia Wants to Cuddle once carried an epigraph from a classic Hollywood film. (When I read an advance copy of the book, it still carried the passage, but then the copyright czars quoted their price and it was too high, evidently.) Here in Roland, an apt but comparatively bargain-basement epigraph (i.e., from a book) sets the tone. “As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you,” wrote Shirley Jackson, that master of the haunted story and haunted mind. Allen is cut from the same cloth and writing, and like Jackson (and Adam too), in the same beleaguered medium.

In a book about living and dying, in other words, about success and love and heartbreak and failure, it’s fitting that the novel itself acts as a long, sneaky, low-boil meditation on the life and looming death of two conjoined media: books and movies. And in this case, books about movies.

Roland is at his most whip-smart and memorable when he’s thinking about his slide—and his industry’s—into one production-line, big-budget action flick after another. He took the money and ran with it, and by the time he slowed down again, all the other types of roles he used to play, all the other types of movies, felt impossible. It’s a premonition of death to turn around and see all your alternative lives floating off behind you, like a trail of dust you’ve kicked up along the way. And now that death really has come for Roland, what he wants is for his memoir to “force a reevaluation” of his career: “People won’t see me as the movie star who bulked up for an action franchise, they’ll see me as the lifelong talent I could have been, if I had only had more time.”

For his part, Adam laments how a death-rattling publishing industry conscripted a queer ex-Mormon writer into what might be called the identitarian literary-industrial complex—or, in other words, another formulaic system. Whether in Roland’s memoir or his own, Adam knew that his appointed task was to write “a tale of adversity, overcome.” And then what? What next? Adam suspects that, in the public consciousness, he had now “already fulfilled [his] one job: be loud, traumatized, and angry. There was no need for more of that schtick. Dance, monkey, dance, then get off the stage. We’ve had enough of you.”

There’s more than a little death flavor in this intellectual love story, appropriately enough—Eros, meet Thanatos. You’ll hate each other at first, but then you’ll go everywhere together …

For Adam and Roland alike, their careers were supposed to be the vehicles to success and self-actualization of the kind that Zoya has managed to divorce from traditional work. And is that really fair? Adam laments that, at his most successful, he still hadn’t found the “silver bullet” to kill off his feelings of triviality, or the depressing sense that the transaction he had chosen with the world of work really was transactional. Dance, monkey, dance, then get off the stage …

It’s in the context of these morbid realizations that love takes on a new, trembling significance—one it can’t always bear. Of course, the premise of the lover is that their love and concern will be more lasting than anything a writer or movie star could expect from the world of strangers. You love your audience, sure, and they love you back—but not really, not really. It has to be different with the lover, it has to be … And there’s the spectacle of Eros trembling under the weight of that expectation.

What I like most about the love story at the heart of Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet is its sweetness and modesty. Roland and Adam’s love flowers quickly, lives deeply but briefly, and then death comes for good. For Roland, it’s a kind of second death, as the Mormons I grew up with sometimes called it: he’s just not around anymore, not even as a ghost.

There’s no sense in Roland that love was somehow supposed to conquer death, ultimately. And of course, the novel is much more invested in this world than the next, more invested in middles than endings. Roland has now changed into a set of memories that the living carry around with them—and into a book that speaks from the grave. It’s one of those transitions that Zoya probably accepts with more good grace than I do, but then I’m still learning, in part with the help of books like Allen’s.

And as for the art forms that Adam and Roland love, Zoya’s pragmatism applies here too. Actually, it’s Roland—who must have been taking notes during his years of living with Zoya—who counsels Adam and himself to just relax a little. Relax, tell a story, love the people and things you love while they’re still here: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies, it’s that sometimes people just need a place to sit for two hours and get outside their heads. Cinema can be high art, but it doesn’t have to be. Adults need bedtime stories, too.”