You can ignore the cover and the copy. They misrepresent what happens inside. Lundy doesn't really have a problem with fame. He always wanted to be a writer but was blocked, after writing one good short story that was published by a respected literary magazine.

He's a famous television personality but he's no more the "idol of millions" than is, say, a CNN anchor. Lundy lives in New York City and walks the streets and takes taxis without anybody so much as noticing him, much less recognizing him or asking him for autographs or anything.

His dream of being a writer might be just that, a fantasy. It's not very clear. He never demonstrates inspiration, ideas. When he's young, in the 1930s, he spends a lot of time sitting at his typewriter, trying to use what he's soaked up while walking around Manhattan all day, bits of people and situations. But later in the 1950s, when his midlife crisis is taking place, he doesn't have any impetus to write at all, just an image in his head of doing it.

Is he "a cheating husband, an indifferent father and a ruthless lover"? Definitely yes to the first two. He's married but has a younger girlfriend who lives in Greenwich Village. He has a teenage daughter but he never wanted children and he's never had much to do with her life and never wanted to.

Ruthless lover? Well, by the standards of mid-century prurience, which this book must observe, there has to be sex and there really should be rape. So there's a scene where he and his girlfriend are going to have sex, he can't get it up, he goes and drinks a bunch of Scotch, gets it up and then has kind of rough sex with her when she thinks it's not going to happen. It's described as violent and unkind but more selfish than nonconsensual.

The one real bonafide rape in the book is when Rex is raped by his wife, which is how they end up having a child. He's passed out drunk and she makes it happen.

Also for the presumed purpose of titillation, their teenaged daughter is in a relationship with an older lesbian. This subplot exists only to jazz things up for the reader and to give the character of the daughter something to do and another something for Rex to struggle with.

The only sacrifice Rex had to make on his way to becoming a highly paid television personality was to change his name from Lundt to Lundy. At one point he cries out about this loss, but it's just a sidenote, really. It's not central to the story, as the loss of Nick Charles's original Greek name is in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man.

The 21" Screen reads like its author likes the activity of writing but doesn't have a strong purpose. There are too many fussy little words and observations that are like shiny clutter,.