Mostly unmemorable people, but a witty satire, nonetheless, about the lives of the idle and beautiful.
The glittering if ephemeral distractions of life in the City of Angels are lampooned with a wry, knowing touch, in a funny first novel by a writer who grew up “surrounded by the movie industry.”
Everyone knows that if you live in L.A., you drive everywhere. Even when the destination is just to the corner, the sidewalks serve only an ornamental purpose. So Mina’s insistence on walking just about everywhere she goes seems not just strange to her friends and husband but more than a little affected. Affectation, however, is the name of the game for almost everyone here. Mina’s best friend, Lorena, is a walking encyclopedia of fashion, her antennae tuned to the slightest shiftings in the cultural winds. Mina herself is the underachieving, neurotic daughter of a once-wealthy film-industry family who now spends her time working in one of Lorena’s restaurants, squabbling with her screenwriter husband, David, and having affairs with two other men. She’s always late to everything and doesn’t have much purpose in life or a driving need to find one. The story, which amounts to little more than interior musings by the characters as they go about their daily routines, is mostly an excuse for Spiotta to engage in some amusing takes on the post-everything ennui of modern-day Los Angeles—including a chain of holistic-therapy clinics where clients cure their inner ills with programs like Tactile Hue Therapy and Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification. A featherweight dusting of surreal comedy keeps the proceedings engagingly light but grow disorienting when Spiotta tries to dig into deeper territory. The peripheral character of Lisa, Lorena’s cleaning woman, is depicted without the sure hand Spiotta brings to her other, non–working-class characters. Meanwhile, Lisa’s situation, with her money woes, angry husband, and demanding children, comes off as fake and artificial, the author resorting to cultural clichés when she ventures into what seems to be unfamiliar territory.
Mostly unmemorable people, but a witty satire, nonetheless, about the lives of the idle and beautiful.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1261-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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