"Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures," by Emma Straub If Emma Straub were pitching her book to Hollywood, she'd have a ready-made, if optimistic, log line: " "The Last Tycoon" meets "A Star Is Born." " Both Fitzgerald's unfinished novel about Hollywood's Golden Age and the film with Judy Garland as an ingénue transformed for the screen cast overwhelming shadows over "Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures," Straub's carefully observed first novel about fame, family drama and personal identity. Ambitious in scope, the story ranges over five decades of an actress's life, beginning in 1929 when little Elsa Emerson of Wisconsin is enthralled by the summer theater her parents run in their barn. But happiness is disrupted by a family tragedy. A teenage Elsa flees to Hollywood and - just like in the movies - becomes Laura Lamont, an Oscar-winning star of the late "30s and "40s. Elsa/Laura has two marriages - first a troubled one to a small-timeactor, then a swooningly idyllic one to a brilliant studio executive - and three children, but eventually her career tumbles so low she's reduced to doing a television game show. The novel's engaging concept plays to our cultural longing to peer behind the movie screen, and Straub keeps her narrative moving, filling it with vivid details. Counterintuitively, the studio dyes Laura's blond hair dark; that becomes a trademark she can never afford to lose. At the height of her fame, if she sets foot in a grocery store, "the whole place would begin to move in slow motion, . . . whispers spreading around the store like brush fire." Yet while films define Laura and this book, the most convincing scenes deal with her second marriage. Pregnant and miserably disillusioned with her self-­absorbed husband, Elsa goes to a party and meets her soon-to-be-next husband, Irving Green. He's the powerful executive of a studio that has a hint of MGM about it but closely resembles Warner Brothers - run by Louis Gardner, it's called Gardner Brothers - right down to the iconic water tower on its lot. Irving sees the star potential beneath Elsa's diffidence and her clumsy married name, Pitts. "Laura Lamont," he says. You want it? It's yours," changing her life with a few words. Beneath the stock Hollywood scene, the malleable Elsa is falling in love. Elsa is partly an hommage to Esther Blodgett of "A Star Is Born," but the novel is even more in debt to Fitzgerald. The short, physically frail Hollywood genius Irving Green mirrors the real-life Irving Thalberg, who inspired Fitzgerald's Monroe Stahr. Straub's epigraph from "The Last Tycoon" cuts away from a passage so that it ends by saying Hollywood can be understood "only dimly and in flashes," quietly saving the next sentence for her novel. One of Fitzgerald's most enduring lines, "Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads," becomes Straub's bland observation about Hollywood success: "It all boiled down to an equation, one too complex for Elsa to imagine." And there, with all its echoes and clunky allusions, lies the novel's nagging flaw. Despite its writerly strengths, "Laura Lamont" feels rote, with the earnestness of a smart, dutiful student's homework. It says nothing substantial or new about the dark underside of fame - we're a lot less surprised than its heroine that celebrity fades - or about split identities. Elsa and Laura merge until she realizes, and Straub states too bluntly, "It seemed impossible to fit all the people she'd ever been into a single body." Straub's strong recent story collection, "Other People We Married," includes surprisingly prickly characters and unexpected twists. As it struggles to escape the burden of its sources, "Laura Lamont" reminds us that there is an alchemical element to any Hollywood equation: the sprinkling of magic that makes research come to life. Caryn James writes the James on Screens film and television blog for Indiewire and is the author of the novels "Glorie" and "What Caroline Knew."