First stab at synopsis - half done

The Oswego Suggestions is the story of a family broken apart by the process of appearing on reality TV. A behind-the-scenes glimpse, it reveals as much about today’s media-soaked American family as it tells of how our behavior changes depending on our audience, and of how watching the narrative of our lives—as told by another—can do little to help us make sense of them.
The story occurs during nine months in 2001, before September 11th and at reality TV’s first peak. It is told by Jareth Oswego, the son of washed-out rocker Zed Oswego who lives in Malibu. Jareth is a brooding, mopey bohemian, an unhappy intellectual whose quiet judgments of the family storming around him place him as a sort of Jude character within the society of his family. Unsure of his role in both his family and in the world at the start of the novel, this place is what he will, over the course of the story, come to better define—breaking out of the “role” chosen for him by the show’s editors, a panel of fates.
Motivated less by greed than the fatherly desire to give his clan all they ask of him, the modest, clumsy patriarch, Zed Oswego, is a former rock star who has toured the world and turned sweetly jaded, content to settle in a Malibu mansion and dote on his brood. Born a shy, nerdy boy in Northern Massachusetts, fame fell into his lap in the form of Rick Moldin, the high-school heavyweight whose garage-band act needed a bassist. Moldin’s narrative is typical of a VH1 backstory—a twittering, skinny energy-ball who never sought food or women, Moldin turned to coke in the 80s, nearly O.D.-ed in the nineties, and hasn’t been fit to tour for twenty years. He’s now a ghost seen around the house, huffing bowls of fruit loops, watching bad TV, swimming obsessively in their lima-bean-shaped outdoor pool (he’s been told to seek a sort of spiritual rebirth from the waters) and smoking endless cigarettes as thin and pale as he is. Because there’s no longer really a band, and because the men are now in their late forties (crotchety for rock stars), the money’s been running out. But Zed’s wife, Maude, continues to spend. Sure, Zed gets the odd producing gig for an old friend, but he’s too much of a pushover to tell Maude “no” when she wants to re-tile the bathroom (she’s an obsessive re-decorator). It’s Zed’s series of poor and eccentric investments, engineered to save Maude from knowledge of the embarrassment of their financial situation, that finally leads Zed to accept a producer’s offer to put the family on TV, buy them a new house, and assuage Maude’s latent desire for fame in whatever form.
And then there are the three kids—born in love, raised in love, they’re the sort of private-school exports that could only have been raised by overly-accepting ex-hippies.
Centrally, there’s Jareth, the brooding dark son who in his quiet hobby habits takes after his father. Jareth enjoys building circuit-boards in the basement, recording video art projects, and writing diatribes which he publishes on the internet. He gets stoned and watches Planet Earth. He’s a shy, gawky artist who is always seen in corners, darkly angsty about his role in broader society (a “Cameron” from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Pursued mercilessly by artsy, bratty high school girls—he’s a Junior, worrying about college—he’s just not interested. He’d rather hang out with Moldin, whose Joyce-ean life stories keep him quiet. When the camera crews come in—he’s drawn to Kenneth, a 23-year-old film student hired to take the house’s establishing shots. Their friendship blurs the line between what can and cannot be shown on screen, and it will end in a betrayal by Kenneth, who shows onscreen a shot that will make his career and destroy their friendship.
In his own family, Jareth is most connected to his eldest sister (by four years), Leona. An intellectual misfit, a Lisa Simpson, Leona should be a Senior at Yale. But she’s taken the semester off. Her depression—latent, and perhaps fictional—spiraled out of control when she was rejected by a long-term unrequited love. But her parents don’t know that was the cause, and neither does her school-appointed shrink. A compulsive liar, she’s petrified of their judgments and has never told anyone about him—about Alan. She would rather the world think of her as a sexless perfectionist, an in-control, un-rejectable genius whose sadness comes only from the fact that she’s too smart for her own good. Clearly Leona doesn’t get along well with her own family. She loves them, certainly, but important parts of her don’t yet know that. It’s over the course of the story, told over one year, that she will learn the depth of this love.
Leona’s bitterest enemy is her mother, Maude. Always distracted—is that a new sweater, Leona? It looks a bit tight—Maude is quick to judgment and quick to spontaneous action. What Zed fell in love with her for she still has—a devilish spark in her eye, the ability to put her feet up out the window on a road-trip, and childishly suggest they pull the car over at that hilarious looking drive-in, buy all of the donuts, and throw them to those seagulls over there. It’s this uncensored blabmouth energy that irks her two reserved children—Leona, and sometimes Jareth (who has more patience for her) and sets them to, when she’s not home, holing up on the couch and watching long films that to her are dull. She wished they’d go outside more, live more. Raised by a mother whose WWII-imposed strictness led them to crave fresh air, Maude xxxxx. Born a beautiful bombshell xxxxxx Dietingxxxxxxx Splenda.




Her favorite child, if such a phrase could be uttered (it wouldn’t be from her hippie-happy lips, but from judgmental Leona’s) is her daughter Celia, aged 16, a year below Jareth. The Paris Hilton of the Oswego clan, Celia has a Lolita-esque beauty so strong that it startles. Tan, long-limbed, deep-voiced and slow talking, Celia moves with a gazelle-like grace like an alien among her spazzy, impatient family members. She is incomprehensible to Leona, who is frankly jealous for Celia’s beauty (especially when she sees Alan interact with her) and for her own mother’s attention toward the other daughter, who offers less in terms of intellectual prowess—what Leona thought everyone should be striving for. Celia herself is far from an empty, beautiful shell. She is Marjorie in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs her Hair—a girl who quickly understands how you get ahead, and who plays by those rules. She likes that boys like her but, like Jareth, doesn’t get a lot out of that.
Celia is the darling of the camera crews, and one of the reasons the family got picked up at all—out of the multitude of Hollywood families desperate enough for the on-camera attention.
It is Celia that Leslie Bennett has fallen in love with. And in the world of Reality TV, Leslie Bennett calls the shots. Bennet is a tennis-sweater wearing, doting pony of a man—his teeth are whitened, his mane is blonde, and he’s as comfortable in a pink polo spearing oysters with a silver tine as he is at the back-table of an East LA dive, pulling at a Kilkenny and having a heart-to-heart with a dude he’d really like to cast as a bouncer. He has always been able to talk to anyone, to make his fey-ness seem pitiable or fashionable. He can tell a story; Like Leona, he has the tendencies of a compulsive liar and he fears them in himself. He has not held down a relationship in a very long time. It could be because he is too busy—he keeps an ear constantly on his cell-phone, and has been known to sleep on the couch in his office—but it’s also because he too well understands people, he too easily reads the insecurities and needs of others, and he hates people for them. He tells himself he has not yet met his match. Bennet moves through the world with unfrilled effortlessness—he glides above the surface, skips from project to project like a tossed stone. What Leslie is drawn to in Celia is yes, that “star quality” he’s gotten a knack for spotting, but also that the girl, for being raised within the walls of Hollywood, does not see him as a god or a star-maker. Their relationship is perfectly civil, normal, and Bennet craves that normality. Their banter eludes Jareth and Zed, disgusts Leona, and makes mother Maude jealous enough to always try and butt in.











The action of the novel takes place over a nine-month period ending in late August 2001, when Leona returns to college, and starting on December 26th, 2000, the day after a Christmas when the family has less to spend on gifts than at other times of year and with money troubles on their mind, Maude decides that with the family all gathered together, it’s a good time to make a happy announcement. Of course, all are not happy. Leona, conveniently home for the holiday break and having three days earlier signed a document ensuring Yale that she would not return for the semester, is flustered by what the novel’s working title refers to—the list of “Suggestions” that Hollywood heavyweight Leslie Bennet urges the family underake before filming begins.
Having already signed the form that they would participate, Maude and Zed Oswego need only get their children to sign. Celia, a draw for the producers, has long-known of the whole scheme though for self-absorbed Jareth it’s a surprise—but, a pushover who’s not really that interested in pop culture, he’s not really in a place to say no. Leona, however, makes a quick decision to do whatever she can to stay disassociated. She opts to be removed from every frame, to be spliced out, blurred out, unmentioned. Her reputation at Yale, she fears, is already that of an Oswego daughter; as if she didn’t have the brains to get in there on her own merit.