Room Tone.

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Room Tone, the debut novella by multitalented Canadian actor, musician, and novelist Gale Zoë Garnett, compacts the biographical details of fictional film, television, and stage actor and singer Dominique Lindskog (stage-named Nica Lind), from age 10 to her late 30s. She’s in “the Family Business” with her Parisian actress mother and Swedish cinematographer father, in later life starring in roles with each, although they have amicably divorced by then from their “open marriage.”

As a novella it cries for longer treatment of Nica’s development as a film star and for more details of her eight-year role in Los Angeles as Lili Dangereuse in the “dramady” western parody, You Mean This Isn’t Cimarron. The satirical treatment of “Hollywood types,” and of the tizzy over Nica’s need for a new “rack” because of her “tits too tiny for a big screen career in California,” is hilarious. Surrounding her is an ensemble cast of easily remembered characters: her caring father, her philandering mother, an aging film mentor known as “The Ugliest Man in Paris,” a couple of screen image lovers, one long-dead, a couple of would-be flesh and blood ones, one a great actor but a hopeless alcoholic, and one a film school director and teacher but also an alcoholic. There is even a childhood nemesis mocking Dominique’s prepubescent frog-like voice before it matures into Nica’s Marlene Dietrich–like throatiness. There are tender moments, too, such as when Nica ends her relationship with the alcoholic school director or in any of several encounters with her father.

The volume’s title of Room Tone, taken from a sound director’s call for total silence in order to record the base level “completely individuated sound of the room,” becomes for Nica “for a moment or two, humans at our best,” for Garnett a symbol of memoir-like poetic insights, and for the reader an experience of sheer pleasure and true entertainment.