View Finder

By Greg Jolley

BB Danser, the patriarch of the eccentric and zealous Danser family, narrates his life story in View Finder. Set during Hollywood’s Golden Age of greed, corruption, and scandal, his memoir is one of madness, passion, murder, and his desperate, lifelong effort to escape the confines of real and modern life.

The son of the famous actress Elizabeth Stark, BB is caught in the middle of his parent’s tumultuous relationship and his father’s crushing megalomania and jealousies. Desperate to escape, he becomes obsessed with movie cameras and cinematic storytelling, becoming transfixed with the metaphorical question: Is it better to view or be viewed?

A roller coaster story of hope and vision, BB searches for the truth about himself and his family in a world of industrialized fantasy making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BHC Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643970059

Greg Jolley

Greg Jolley earned a Master of Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco. He is the author of the suspense novels about the fictional Danser family. He lives in the Very Small town of Ormond Beach, Florida.

Reviews for View Finder

[postsbygina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I won this book in a giveaway. I was skeptical at first but as I continued to read, I realized I was hooked. The story is well-written and you kinda want to root for the protagonist. As much as it's about him saving someone else, it's really about him saving himself. Recommend.

[simonea_533972 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As I received a free copy of this book from the Early Reviewers program, I have to write a review here. I find myself struggling to do so, since I have absolutely no idea how I feel about the book and if I understood it. The story was vague, the writing was vague, the setting was vague (are we in 'our' world or is this some alternative universe). Luckily, the book was a short read, so I finished it quite quickly, but I don't really know what I've read and how to feel about it other than confused.

[lisbethe-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I received a free e-copy of this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, in exchange for an honest review. I just read through the review by LyndaInOregon, and it's so spot on, I'm left with little to add. I found the book a bit frustrating. The protagonist was so passive about circumstances that should have prompted more mental "connectedness" (or something!), that I questioned whether drugs or mental illness was the way to explain how he navigated through ljfe. But we never get a particularly good answer. Interesting concept, and well-written, but not particularly satisfying.

[lyndainoregon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

DISCLOSURE: An electronic copy of this book was provided by publishers BHC Press, via Library Thing, in exchange for review.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~The reader who wants a fictional work to answer all the questions it raises, who wants all plot threads neatly tucked in and woven flat, will find little but frustration in Greg Jolley’s View Finder. Characters without backstory wander into and out of the frame, questions go unanswered, the ultimately unreliable narrator frequently loses his hold on reality, and even key characters make decisions that range from pointless to illogical.That said, this book that reads like a Luis Buñuel screenplay adaptation of a Shirley Jackson novel by way of Sigmund Freud, digs into the reader’s forebrain and refuses to go away.We meet the narrator, BB Danser, nearing his 15th birthday and engrossed in the making of a short 3-D film, aided and abetted by his movie star mother. BB’s relationship to her is an almost textbook Freudian study – she is beautiful, seductive, and indulgent, while his father is brutal, drunken, and emotionally castrating. Not surprisingly, BB wants to “rescue” her. (The reader is never given a glimpse into what Mumm thinks about all this; in fact there is no POV except BB’s, throughout the book.)In fact, BB goes through most of the book trying to rescue people, mostly female. At various times, he tries to save his mother, one of Daddy’s bimbos, a probably fictional girl whose call for assistance was published in the Letters column of a favorite comic book, a drugged and ultimately demented young woman who inexplicably demands to be called “Mother”, an abandoned baby found in a hotel bathtub, a pair of twins of vague provenance, two little girls destined for the sex trade, and various other waifs and foundlings who may or may not have any impact on the plot, such as it is. Through all this, BB is incredibly passive. The book’s title is smack on here – he views things but never really sees them, in the sense of comprehending what is really going on, and so he doesn’t react to them in any meaningful way.The book is firmly grounded in the decade from 1955 to the mid-sixties, and continually returns to the touchstone of movies – the language, the drug-fueled decadence of that era’s Hollywood, the inability or unwillingness to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Jolley returns again and again to the notion of 3-D – not only on the screen but somehow in real life, as BB is frequently incapable of even viewing (let alone seeing) what’s going on around him without the crutch of a pair of 3-D goggles.Written in seven “acts” and 16 “scenes”, the novel fades to black as BB determines that no more rescues are required and that God “leaves the acting and directing to us [because] he loves our stories.”That this bit of sophistry has very little to do with anything in the rest of the book shouldn’t come as a surprise. Readers who want to puzzle out the deeper meanings and interpret the symbolism will have a field day with this novel; others will have abandoned their popcorn and wandered out into the daylight, blinking in disorientation, some time ago.