Calling all classic film lovers
A review of Caroline Bock’s The Other Beautiful People
By Norah Vawter
Caroline Bock’s first novel for adults, The Other Beautiful People (Regal House 2026), is rich, layered, intellectually complex, and, yes, beautiful. Equal parts domestic fiction and workplace drama, the novel centers on Amy Greene, a television executive, wife, mother, and film aficionado whose life is combusting. She finds herself overwhelmed and pulled in too many directions, by too many people all vying for her attention and loyalty, as she tries to figure out what she wants from her own life. Perhaps for the first time.
It’s late 2001. Amy and her husband Jack have just moved from Manhattan to Silver Spring, Maryland, partly because Jack was offered a new job, but mostly because in the aftermath of September 11 he’s terrified to stay in New York. He was in the World Trade Center that morning, on a job interview: though he managed to get out unhurt, he’s understandably traumatized.
Amy is planning to split her time between Maryland and New York, commuting on Amtrak. But before she’s had a chance to get the new schedule going, dual crises erupt at home and work. Jack has a heart attack. Their son Adam rushes home from college, with a new girlfriend in tow. And Amy’s boss Owen announces major changes to the Cinema Channel, the small cable channel that they basically co-run together though Owen has the higher position.
As she struggles to take care of everyone else’s needs, she’s also grieving her father, who died recently, her mother, whose death many years ago she never had a chance to process, and the sense of safety and security that was ripped away when the Twin Towers fell. This is not a political novel, but the aftermath of 9/11 is a powerful backdrop that Bock makes use of. There’s so much going on in The Other Beautiful People, and I’m impressed at how well it all fits together. Setting the action in this moment in time is brilliant. Bock’s characters are living in a time of limbo, in a world both surreal and unstable. CNN is on in the background everywhere, soldiers patrol Union Station, posters advertise missing loved ones, and the past, present, and future seem intertwined.
“We were up on the roof for hours. This wasn’t any scene from any movie I’d want to see. The streets emptied. The skies were choked with a sickly twilight of plastic burning. Siren-wails, sirens wound up and released like bomb bursts, and helicopter and fighter jets and more sirens streaked across the sky.”
The one constant in Amy’s life is her love of cinema, particularly classic films of the 1930s and ‘40s. This theme runs throughout the novel, grounding the story and the character, as we see how Amy makes sense of her messy, convoluted world. When she meets someone, she imagines which actor she’d cast to play them in a movie. After 9/11, Owen becomes a brooding Paul Newman. A tall, gangly ER doctor is a young Jimmy Stewart.
Author Caroline Bock
At dramatic moments, Amy imagines herself in a silent film, or the scene in black and white, or that she is outside of the scene, looking in. And in lighter moments the dialogue is reminiscent of screwball comedies—think Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy—filled with clever quips and rat-a-tat rhythm as the characters spar with words. And of course there are a million clever film references. I love old movies, and I really enjoyed the film geek element of the book. It’s a lot of fun, but it also gives us so much insight into Amy Greene, who often finds herself on the outside of a scene, looking in.
“She knows something I don’t know. I can tell by how she’s sitting straight as a dancer. If she were a classic movie star, she’d be Audrey Hepburn, no questions asked.”
The author spent two decades working in television, handling public relations and marketing at USA, BRAVO, and AMC, and her deep personal knowledge of the inner workings of a TV station is evident throughout this novel. Bock has said, “I was part of the executive team that launched and ran the Independent Film Channel (IFC) and IFC Films. The job, and even more, the people, defined me—and consumed me. They are the inspiration for The Other Beautiful People.”
After leaving television, Caroline Bock completed an MFA in creative writing at The City College of New York and moved to the D.C. area. She has published two young adult novels, and her short story collection Carry Her Home won the prestigious Washington Writers’ Publishing House fiction award in 2018. Since 2022, Bock has been the co-president of WWPH. (Read our interview with Bock and her co-president Jona Colson.) WWPH has been a fixture of the D.C. area literary world for fifty years, but I’ve noticed a lot of new activity under Bock and Colson’s leadership, including the release of multiple anthologies.
“Maybe I’ve never moved from being a flack or publicist. I hold to what I can. The world may think I have it all together. That I am capable. I have worked hard my whole life to be seen as capable—not as the motherless kid, not as the new kid, in the new school, hoping she wouldn’t get lost on her way back to the latest basement or garage apartment, holding tight to her little brother’s hand.”
Amy is extremely capable. She’s the person who keeps the Cinema Channel running, keeps all the balls in the air, and it’s obvious that Owen doesn’t appreciate her nearly as much as he should. But she’s also lost. The problem is that she didn’t choose to be where she is. In her early twenties she got pregnant with Adam and married Jack. Soon after, she started working with Owen. Amy has been cleaning up messes, and making life work, and getting things done, day after day, year after year. But now she’s 43, and she doesn’t know what she wants. She’s caught in a love triangle of sorts between Jack and Owen, or perhaps it’s between her family and her work family, or simply home and work.
At times I felt frustrated with Amy because I was waiting for her to make a decision. I was ready for her to change. But The Other Beautiful People is a slow burn. Like many intellectually thoughtful literary novels, the middle stretches as Bock subverts our expectations of neat and tidy character growth. I do think the book could be tightened, as a couple subplots felt unnecessary and didn’t grip me. But on the other hand, I see what Bock is doing, and why these “unnecessary” bits might be necessary. All these strands of plot add to the realism and messy, slow character growth. Real life is seldom as neatly as organized as a movie, after all.
So, settle in with some buttered popcorn, or my favorite combination of a hot pretzel and Junior Mints. Because in the end, The Other Beautiful People does come to a satisfying, well-earned conclusion. You’ll want to bring snacks.
Preorder your copy of The Other Beautiful People directly from theindependent publisher,Bookshop, or your favorite local independent bookstore.
Learn more about the author on her website:https://carolinebockofficialauthor.site/
You can attend the book launch at Politics and Prose on June 2. Details about this and many more local, upcoming events here.
Caroline Bock was once a movie-loving television executive. She worked for twenty years in the cable television industry, notably at AMC, Bravo, and IFC. She is the author of Carry Her Home, a short story collection (winner of the Fiction Award from the Washington Writers' Publishing House), and the young adult novels Before My Eyes and LIE. A graduate of the City College of New York and their MFA in Fiction program and Syracuse University, where she studied creative writing with Raymond Carver, she still loves going to the movies. The Other Beautiful People is her first novel for adults.
Norah Vawter is the co-founder and fiction/nonfiction editor of Washington Unbound. She’s a freelance writer, editor, and novelist. Her debut novel will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2028. Follow her on Instagram @norahvawter and check out her Substack, Survival by Words.
