THE WESTERN COAST

by Paula Fox ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 1972

Annie Gianfala is not one of Paula Fox's Desperate Characters -- by far the sharper book -- but one of those uncertain transients with smudged hopes and intentions, perhaps marriage and children and reading Jane Austen. When first seen here she's modeling at the Art Students League and moving among bedraggled artists and Communists and homosexuals. When she goes to the Coast she takes odd jobs, ""dumb"" jobs, and again seems to trail ""a wake of debris"" among movie people or bums or painters or Negroes or more radicals. There's a dissolved marriage to older bullying Walter in between. But in all this lack of definition, Annie seems unlikely to attain hers although she connects a little more when she returns to the deathbed of an uncle, surrogate for her absentee-alcoholic father. . . . Paula Fox is a marvelously noticing writer and her book succeeds as a photomontage of tentative experience -- where it fails is that the token story and even Annie get lost in all these desultory encounters and exchanges.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1972

ISBN: 0393322866

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1972

Categories: FICTION