My Face for the World to See (New York Review Books Classics)

'anyone who has enjoyed Mad men will appreciate Hayes; observations, his essayistic asides, and above all his narrators.  They are a bit like Don Draper without the silly gothic background.  And they can turn out a fine sentence.'

'superb slip of a novel .... a fascinating piece of 1950s Hollywood noir'

'What makes this book last (once again, I have to salute NYRB for fishing out from obscurity yet another masterpiece) is the glimpse it gives us of the sort of person who goes to Hollywood in order to become famous ... Hayes is a master of the withheld detail: we learn what the woman's clothes are like, but all the narrator tells us, very often, and with an edge of mockery, is that she is "very pretty".'

“An exciting, engrossing work, written with beautiful economy and the sure skill of an artist who knows what he is doing.... Mr. Hayes has created characters that are the essence of human hopes and frailty.”

“The most vivid picture of Hollywood since Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust.”

“All of Alfred Hayes’s writing has been marked by a fine grace and finish; and My Face for the World to See is like his earlier books in its quiet control of words and effects. Grace, finish, control—or plain style—are all rare qualities in the generally verbose weather of contemporary prose; and when they appear they must be greeted with honest gratitude and praise.”

“Hayes writes luminously about people who can’t help themselves, who can’t resist the temptations that are set to destroy them.... Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.”

“A constant tug back to the LCD of raw humanity is one of the most striking features of Mr. Hayes’s superficially sophisticated writing.... This is an insidious, nasty, nagging book, with a bitter after-taste: but there is no doubt in the world that Mr. Hayes knows what he is about.”

“In it is captured the essence of Hollywood, the bitterness which lies beneath the pleasant aroma of success and fame.... In the compass of this novel, Hayes, who is one of the best novelists writing today [1958], has captured the ineffable sadness which marches in the van of success, has touched the corrupting qualities of Hollywood which have escaped most of those who have written about this fabled town.”

Deeply moving.”

Alfred Hayes is one of the secret masters of the twentieth century novel, a journalist and scriptwriter and poet who possessed an immaculate ear and who wrote with razorsharp intelligence about passion and its payback.
My Face for the World to See is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame and you’re only as real as your image. At a party, the narrator, a screenwriter, rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into the Pacific. He is living far from his wife in New York and long ago shed any illusions about the value of his work. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without really meaning to, he gets involved with the young woman, who has, it seems, no illusions about love, especially with married men. She’s a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures. She’s just like him, he thinks, and as their casual relationship takes on an increasingly troubled and destructive intensity, it seems that might just be true, only not in the way he supposes.