The plot of The Golden Calf, Henry Baum’s second novel, reads like it was born of a dare. “Henry, I dare you to write a novel with a sympathetic Hollywood stalker. Give him a dull life, a dull job, call him Ray. Then turn him into an anti-celebrity missionary disgusted by the wealthy man’s ignorance of the Everyman’s plight. Make him pity Hollywood while simultaneously conscious of the need to help those wrecked by the Hollywood lifestyle. Most importantly, Mr. Baum, make me agree with this man.”

“Sure,” Henry Baum says. “And just for fun, I’ll make it damn good, too.”

The Golden Calf tracks the slow maturation of our Everyman, Ray Tompkins, from idle citizen occupied by various low rung jobs to a self-starting, though often self-important, anti-celebrity activist, stalking Brad Pitt-ish/Tom Cruise-esque kindred, Tim Griffith. His intent: to make the star “feel the curse of [his own] contentment” [pg. 110]. This all while maintaining a disquieting respect for Tompkins; an impressive balancing act considering the lengths Tompkins goes to affect the movie star.

Baum eases his protagonist into the stalking mentality with enough grace to let the reader ride the transition, rather than be jarred by it. With well-paced revelations regarding Tompkins’s always frayed childhood, family life, and personal relationships, the move from passive nobody to stalker feels natural, yet it retains necessary moral conflict in order to keep the reader engaged. Tompkins weighs this dilemma most directly when first leaving notes for Griffith at the star’s beach house:

Part of my mind was saying, don’t go, you’ll get caught and this will be all over and you haven’t done half of what you said you would do. The other half was saying, fuck him, he deserves it. Lately the latter half was winning the argument. [pg. 113]

The novel stops short of condoning Tompkins’s actions, in part by touching on the hypocrisies inherent with his actions. Ray’s subtle rise to his own version of fame – a place in life where people associate his image with destroying Hollywood egocentrism – feels too similar to the fame he claims to detest. Tompkins even touches on the need of fame in order to deliver his message of anti-fame:

To be unknown was to not exist, and that was the same as death. The best way to get fame was to touch fame, get close to it, show it what mattered and what didn’t, make it realize the things it didn’t know. [pg. 74]

These hypocrisies pepper the novel enough to destroy any façade of a perfect philosophy. Tompkins is an intentionally flawed character, driven but still human, which makes the journey all the more engaging. After all, this isn’t a manifesto or a treatise. This is a novel, and a damn good one at that.

“So, how was the read?” Henry Baum may ask.

“Beautiful,” I would say. “But I’ve learned better than to worship you for it.”

This post is tagged Henry Balm, The Golden Calf