Out of Competition

Out of Competition is a comedy set inside a film festival that is itself out of competition.

The setting is a thinly veiled Cannes on the French Riviera. A failing Hollywood producer moves through democracy demonstrators, a kidnapping, and the festival deputy's quiet coup against his boss, while a Russian impresario's promotional shark falls from a helicopter into the bay. People who should win do not; people who should not, do. The dialogue runs in English and French as the cast does, and the novel keeps the tempo of a festival week, all scheduling and accident and competing publicity machines.

Out of Competition won the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, recognized for a comic-novel structure that takes the international film festival as a working political stage and lets the form do the satire that the dialogue would otherwise have to spell out.