Handsome Eddie Hartley was once a golden boy poised for the kind of success promised by good looks and a modicum of talent. Now thirty-three, he has abandoned his dream of an acting career and accepted the reality of life as a drama teacher at the boys' prep school he once attended. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it' s one disappointment too many.
Weighted down with debt, Susan' s mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-Web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. In an era when any publicity is good publicity, Eddie imagines that the tape won' t cause any harm— a mistake that will have disastrous consequences and propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved.
A hilariously biting and incisive takedown of our culture' s monstrous obsession with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man' s belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.
