Book Review: Molly Bit, a novel by Dan Bevacqua (2020)

The cover of Molly Bit, by Dan Bevacqua, 2020.

Writer Dan Bevacqua.

Dan Bevacqua’s debut novel, titled Molly Bit, is a look at an actress who becomes a famous movie star. I thought that was an interesting enough concept for a book, so I took a chance on buying it after reading a review. There are fine moments sprinkled throughout Molly Bit, but ultimately, I didn’t enjoy it that much. 

Bevacqua is a good writer, but he also has an MFA from Columbia—he should be a good writer. An example of his prose that I particularly liked was this: “She’d always thought older guys would be less touchy, but they were actually worse. A man in his thirties understood when his life was falling apart. A young one didn’t care—he thought he had more chances.” (p.39) 

What I found most difficult about Molly Bit was, well, Molly Bit. She’s not defined enough as a character to be truly interesting—she comes off as too much of a cipher. You can argue that’s the point, that she’s an actress who pleases other people while having little interior life of her own, but I’d argue back that’s not the best choice for a lead character in a novel. There’s not much I can really tell you about Molly Bit, besides the fact that she seems to crave a cigarette every three pages or so. 

Molly Bit is split up into chapters that take place years apart, which might not be the most effective technique. Because so few characters overlap chapters, I got less of an emotional impact from the novel. That also puts more weight on Molly as the lead character, since she’s the bridge between the chapters, and she can’t really take that, because she’s so thinly drawn. Oh, and if Molly Bit was really as poor as she’s meant to be in the first chapter, there’s no way she would have had a computer at college in 1993. 

There are clever bits for film fans to get, like the Vanity Fair article about Molly when she’s an up and coming young starlet: “Girl From the Future: Why in Six Months Everybody Will Know Who Molly Bit Is.” (p.69) That’s the kind of specificity that Molly Bit the novel, and Molly Bit the character, could use more of. 

Can we talk about names for a minute? Molly Bit is ridiculous enough—I guess it’s meant to be a pun on an actor being a “bit” player. But some of the other characters are named Kate Uppley and Roger Michael Vincent. One can only assume the author was staring at pictures of Kate Upton while watching reruns of Airwolf. If you’re writing an over the top comedic novel, sure, you can give your characters names like this. But Molly Bit isn’t an over the top comedic novel. Although there are some comedic moments: “Molly remembered the exact moment when she knew it was over with Jared. She’d been hanging upside down by a guidewire off the side of a building.” (p.110)

As a fan of Tom Wolfe, I did appreciate that one of the characters is reading The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bevacqua describes the way he’s sitting thus: “The phrase was perhaps legs and arms akimbo.” (p.109) Since “legs akimbo” was one of Wolfe’s pet phrases that crops up again and again in his writing, I assume that this was a little tip of the hat to the man in white. (Wolfe even wrote a fictitious hip-hop song with the lyrics “shanks akimbo” for his novel A Man in Full.) 

What also hampers Molly Bit so much is what happens to Molly Bit, which is given away in the very first line of the synopsis inside the dust jacket. It seems like such a cliché—like it’s a Lifetime movie from the 1990’s. 

We might ask for too much from novels about artists: first, we expect the novel itself to be a great work of art, and then on top of that the novelist has to convince us that the artist in question has created great art in this different medium—film, painting, sculpture, etc. That’s a heavy task. 

Molly Bit is by turns interesting and frustrating. Bevacqua clearly has talent, and it will be interesting to see where it takes him next.