Customer Reviews

Greetings from the Golden State: A Novel

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I LOVED this book! The author truly captures the dysfunctional, crazy life of a family of disconnected souls in the San Fernando Valley. The characters are so oddball, so non-functional, so real, that I did not want this novel to end! Besides bringing back memories of growing up in the Valley, this book delighted me with tales of the quirky lives of Fanny, Andrew, Don and Little Mike, all brilliantly and poignantly protrayed by the author. I highly recommend it!

Brenner has a winner here. "Greetings from the Golden State" is hard to put down. The Kelbow family, with all of its dysfunctions, moves through the cycle of life with incredible humor laced with with realism. We all know families like the Kelbows, and we may even have a touch of them in our own lives. Brenner has a magic touch with dialogue and her characters chew up the scenery. Very funny book!

Leslie Brenner's deubt novel, "Greetings from the Golden State," is a wickedly delightful excursion into the flawed lifestyle of a realtively wealthy suburban Los Angeles Jewish family over the course of three decades. Combining incredibly funny observations about the anguished hopes and frustrated realities of the Kelbow family, the author successfully disguises tart criticism of a terribly bankrupt type of living with a bizarre, bittersweet examination of the separate lives of the Kelbow family. The Kelbows emerge as an archtype: wealthy, smug San Fernando Valley Jews, whose two precocious sons fritter away their lives in fatuous relationships, failed employment and fractured visions of their own importance. "Greetings" slices and dices the illusion of affluence and the supposed perfection of the Southern California dream; what emerges is the rather shocking and unsettling revelation that Ms. Brenner has held the mirror up to not only the Kelbows, but our national obsession with image, wealth and glitz.

"Greetings" presents a serialized narrative of the central characters who populate the constantly-changing Kelbow family. The central mother figure, Fanny, suffers through two miserable marriages and is constantly aware of her own mother's unspoken disapproval of everything she represents. Fanny's first husband, Don, almost dissolves into caricature; he abandons his marriage and dabbles with practically every cultural fad that Southern California seems to spawn. Andrew, the central character of the novel, is singularly unappealing. His intelligence and sense of slef distorted by excessive indulgence, Andrew is a bland failure at everything -- jobs, family responsibilites, relationships. Stifled by a self-induced inertia, he wandes through the novel in search of commitment. His brother, Little Mike, is a Jewish nightmare come to life. A high-school drop-out, Little Mike develops a taste for alcohol, drugs and deception; his pathetic attemps at righting his corrupt life are masterful examples of social satire.

The central conceit of the novel, exquisitely prepared gourmet food, ironically balances the novel's central theme: hunger. Ms. Brenner, with humor and trenchant social commentary, savages a Southern California lifestyle that exalts surface satisfaction but hides genuine anguish, loneliness and falsehood. The Kelbows never get it; phony lifestyle and glitzy trappings are exactly that -- illusory, unfulfilling and deceptive. "Greetings from the Golden State" compels us to observe our culture from the perspective of humor and sarcasm; the result is a biting, witty and true indictment of a type of life to which most of us still aspire.

"Golden State" takes a fast, furious glide through 30 years in the life of Andrew Kelbow, a bright but unfocused guy from a broken L.A. home. The novel really glides along, and the prose is precise and clever. You get a real sense of what it was like to grow up in L.A. But this is light fare, lighter certainly than the duck recipe that does one character in. These lives don't have great meaning; like the city they inhabit, they're mainly surface. But for debut fiction, it's assured and clever. I enjoyed spending time with these people, particularly Fanny, the matriarch who seems to surf through her life. BTW, I was amused by the first page, in which I find out Andrew was born a mere five days after I was.

To me, this is the perfect summer read. Humorous, believable characters, not hokey or mushy, and well-written. Add to that, short chapters and the difficulty in putting the book down. The story follows Fanny and her family from the 1960's to the 1990's and does so in a very entertaining way. Some might feel that the author is disparaging California; as a second-generation Californian, I was not offended. To share the joy, I will soon be lending this book to my sister.

The characters are all quite lovable in this easy to read novel. Although I wondered what the plot was throughout I found the characters very human, funny and real. I would have liked to have seen a bit more substance to the novel in general but aside from that I think Brenner did a great job. This book doesn't seem to have a great ranking on Amazon. Readers don't know what they are missing!!!

I thought this book was funny and descriptive of the characters... but often times I wondered, "what is this book really about?" You have the Kelbow family, who seem to have it all and then don't. The breakdown the American family and the inability to really "grow up" is their problem. But in the book's defense, the characters were witty and funny which made the book enjoyable nonetheless. It was an easy read, but again there wasn't much substance to the novel. I liked and disliked it at the same time...