Charming heroine offers a guided tour through retro Los Angeles.
Personal memoir thinly disguised as fiction by O’Connor (Impasses de la fidelite, 1991).
Plucky Yvette O’Leary leaves her homeland of Noumea, New Caledonia (the titular “over there”) and conquers the Los Angeles real estate market of the early ’60s, finding true love on her journey. Financial independence her only goal, Yvette sells luxury apartments in Wilshire Manor, overcoming the vicious backbiting of colleagues and Los Angelenos’ distrust of the Eastern co-op system. She shares her professional tribulations with her lover Russ, also dissatisfied with his job as a sales manager for the Wall Street Journal. But while Russ seeks only to earn enough money to go “fiu”–i.e., flee commitment and responsibility to indulge his desire for travel–Yvette craves security. Their relationship survives seemingly divisive philosophical differences as they learn to appreciate one another’s motivations. O’Connor’s evocative portrayal of Los Angeles during a pivotal era of its development is often fascinating, although her tendency to convey historical information through lengthy, awkward dialogue between Russ and Yvette weakens the narrative. Readers will enjoy getting to know the novel’s many interesting characters, all of whom come from diverse geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds but are united by the drive for financial success. She also touches upon several of the alternative social movements of the time–the beatniks and the drug culture of Venice, in particular–but her depictions are disappointingly superficial. Perhaps because Yvette is so clearly based on herself, O’Connor seems not to notice some of the character’s most unique characteristics: While most of the women in the novel have gained their wealth through their association with men, whether by inheritance or marriage, Yvette gets by on the strength of her own accomplishments. Yvette’s tantalizing back story, including her departure from New Caledonia through marriage to an itinerant magician and an early business venture raising chinchillas in Los Angeles, is the stuff of a future novel. O’Connor’s prose sings, but occasionally off-key.
Charming heroine offers a guided tour through retro Los Angeles.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4134-9414-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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