Tim Blake Nelson has played the weirdo. His new book satirizes the freaks who run Hollywood
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On the Shelf Superhero By Tim Blake Nelson Unnamed Press: 424 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Picture 14-year-old Tim Blake Nelson sitting at dinner in Oklahoma, delivering a 25-word book report on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The assignment came from his father; literary discussion was expected to ensue.“I grew up at a dinner table at which frivolous conversation rarely occurred,” Nelson said.
“Books were really revered in our home.”We spoke over Zoom about Nelson’s particularly literary childhood while he was at a film festival in Poland.His second novel, “Superhero,” hits shelves this winter.
It’s a gentle Hollywood satire — and any resemblance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, you know, coincidental.As an actor, Nelson broke through in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” co-starring with George Clooney and John Turturro.With his hangdog face and authentic Oklahoma twang, he might have spent the last 25 years playing dim-witted yokels.
But he’s carved out an expansive and varied career as an actor, moving between blockbusters, indie film sets and the MCU.“Superhero” riffs on those experiences, with the details obscured by what Nelson called “a lot of smudging.” This kaleidoscope of a novel follows several characters trying to make a franchise film for a comics-based studio — the star, his producer wife, the director, the cinematographer and more.Each has a rich past wanting to create art, a yearning that eventually comes into conflict with the project of making a $160-million movie.Take, as an example, the director of photography, a character named Javier Benavidez.
As an adolescent, he learns about the process of light and shadow transforming into photographic images, described in vivid detail.“That chapter use...