After a lengthy side-trip into TV writing (for the Emmy-winning sitcom Frasier), novelist/playwright/lyricist Joe Keenan is back with a deadly clever third foray into high-society adventure for Philip Cavanaugh and his best friend and former lover, Gilbert. As with 1988's Blue Heaven and 1992's Putting on the Ritz, the boys are joined by Claire, a bright and talented woman who really ought to be doing greater things with herself than hanging out with the gormless Philip and the larky trouble-magnet that Gilbert invariable proves himself to be. But whereas the earlier books took place in the upper echelons of New York City's social set, Keenan moves the action in My Lucky Star (Little, Brown; $24.95) to Los Angeles: yes, as the old song has it, it's "swimming pools and movie stars."

It also features a new fraud perpetrated by Gilbert that spins disastrously out of control, triggering a landslide of surprises and complications that get more and out of hand, generating deeper distress and harder laughs right up to the book's waning pages.

This time Gilbert takes advantage of his mother's current romantic liaison with a big-time movie producer to jam his foot into the door of screenwriting success. He achieves this by passing off one of Hollywood 's classics, in slightly re-written form, as his own spec
script--an audacious rip-off that goes right over the nearly empty head of Bobby Spellman, a proudly contemporary producer with no use for anything filmed in black and white.

Thoughtfully, Gilbert (all too aware of his creative limitations) has added Philip and Claire to the title page as writing partners, the better to lure them to L.A. and wrangle them into co-writing a new script. Spellman has commissioned a screenplay based on a dreadful World War II potboiler titled A Song for Greta (but, thankfully, re-named The Heart in Hiding for the silver screen).

When one of Tinseltown's pre-eminent moviemaking families--a mother-and-son duo consisting of fading star Diana Malenfant and red-hot action-move heart-throb Stephen Donato--express interest in starring in Gilbert's new project, Philip promptly finds himself thrust into the role of a lifetime as the newest romantic interest for the deeply closeted Stephen.

A few adroit twists later, Philip finds himself taking the nom-de-guerre Glen for a second performance--that of Lily Malenfant's ghost-writer, the better to contain the libelous stories Diana's washed-up sister Lily threatens to spill in a new tell-all bio that includes choice tidbits about Stephen and his frisky summer romp with a male tennis instructor.

As if this didn't already spell big trouble in capitals and italics, Blue Heaven's she-Satan, Moira, pops up on the scene, ready and willing to blackmail our trio of heroes for her own indecent purposes.

Scandalous home-made sex movies, upper-crust gay bordellos, a venomously homophobic district attorney, and a raucous guest-shot by a male escort in Oscar statuette drag serve as benchmarks on the book's thermometer as things heat up and boil over.

But it's the confused romance between superstar hunk Stephen Donato and Philip that anchors the story; from Philip's first meeting with the larger-than-life heart-throb (which sets several bits of his anatomy other than his heart throbbing instantly) to the tatters of romantic illusion that grace the aftermath of the book's outrageous, hilarious convolutions, Philip remains steadfastly smitten. It's all rather sweet--even if the rollercoaster romance does play out on the tip of a roaring tidal wave of insanely swift and complex plotting.

Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz have earned Keenan's novels comparisons to the work of P.G. Wodehouse, and it's easy to see why. Like Keenan, Wodehouse was also a lyricist as well as a novelist skilled at deliriously complex plotting and fond of inventive prose (though one could hardly imagine Wodehouse tossing out a line like, "I prayed
with all my heart that he might some day instill these noble qualities in me, preferably
via fellatio").

Moreover, the endlessly resourceful Claire is nothing short of Jeeves reincarnated, though in this case she's a fag hag rather than a personal valet. But in keeping with the change of locale, My Lucky Star rings with more filmic echoes--say, Singin' in the Rain meets Cosby and Hope on the road through a Robert Altman flick spiced up with a shakerful each of Woody Allen and Paddy Chayefsky.

Witty, twisted, dry as a martini, and sporting more daringly stylish wrinkles than a Hollywood bad boy's tuxedo after a long night in questionable company, My Lucky Star lampoons the very excess in which it gleefully partakes, jumping from the lofty to the low and back again with easy abandon.

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