Her Name Was Lola [Paperback]

Russell Hoban (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2004

'This is it ...this is my destiny woman,' Max blurted out when he first met Lola at the Coliseum shop. Not only was she aristocratic and wild at heart, but the two discovered an uncanny convergence of musical tastes. Soon they were converging at every level - Lola filling Max's emptiness and vice versa. But Max had also always craved the recognition of another sort of woman, the sort who had been Homecoming Queen at her high school - just as the tempting Lula Mae Flowers had been back in Texas. Why did Max have to meet Lula Mae just when he'd found his destiny woman in Lola? And if Lola embodied everything Max longed for, how could there be anything left over for Texan ex-Homecoming Queens?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hoban (Riddley Walker, etc.) spins a light, wry fantasy about a middle-aged writer's past misdeeds, faltering career and misapprehensions about love. Max Lesser, a writer of "novels that don't sell, children's picture books that do," is on his way to lunch when a smelly dwarf, invisible to all but Max, affixes itself to him. Named Apasmara ("forgetfulness" in Hindu mythology), the dwarf reminds him not to forget his long-lost love, Lola Bessington. Subsequent flashbacks reveal how Max met the youthful, well-to-do Lola at a London record shop and promptly decided that she was his "destiny." Of course, then he quickly enjoys a flirtation with a curvy Texan, Lula Mae Flowers. Both women get pregnant; Lola disappears; and, oh, the battles Max has with his logical mind. He also spars with his protagonist, Moe Levy, whose "Page One" he can't even write, and Charlotte Prickles, the popular hedgehog heroine of his children's series. Meanwhile, Lola, accompanied by her new son Noah, finds enlightenment at a Zen center called Diamond Heart, where she learns to play the sarod and composes a raga that will eventually bring her and her love together again. Hoban's quirky, tender tale progresses in brief chapters and playful leaps to come looping back full circle; some readers will enjoy the journey, while others will find that Hoban's form trumps his content.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Hoban, author of a best-selling picture book series about a whimsical badger named Frances, as well as several novels for adults, including the cult classic Riddley Walker (1980), again offers something completely different. This wonderfully funny, refreshing, and compelling love story will grab readers from the moment they meet clueless Max Lesser, a children's book author and somewhat successful adult fiction writer who is suffering from a major case of writer's block. When Max meets Lola Bessington, he declares her his "destiny woman." All other women pale in comparison to Lola--except for the lovely Lulu Mae Flowers, who signals the beginning of a major life catastrophe for Max. Hoban gives the reader a rare glimpse into a writer's creative process, using the story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure to good effect and making the most of Max's ongoing conversations with his phantoms and his own characters. Delivering a metaphorical kick in the pants to those who live too much in our minds, this delightful novel urges us to live our destiny and stop postponing our dreams. Jennifer Baker
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks (November 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747568375
• ISBN-13: 978-0747568377
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,247,213 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A love story in playful mind games, October 4, 2004

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Her Name Was Lola: A Novel (Hardcover)

London-based American writer Hoban, who has written 12 novels for adults and over 60 children's books, gives us London-based (possibly American - he's always being taken for a visitor) writer Max who writes "novels that don't sell, children's picture books that do." One of Hoban's novels is the majorly successful "Riddley Walker," but Max is also about 35 years younger than Hoban, so the comparison, invited by his story-within-a-story form, holds and the dedication to a friend, "a.k.a. known as Seamus Flannery," the character who happens to be Max's best friend, reinforces it.

The book opens in 2001 when Max, suffering "blighter's rock," over both his novel and his children's book, collects an unlabeled CD in the mail, and goes to meet Seamus for lunch. Suddenly "the world becomes not there and he has to stop in his tracks while he sees nothing but moving shapes of black. ...He'd like to think it's his mind playing up but this feels as if it's coming from somewhere else. The black shapes are as sharp as double-edged razor blades and Max fears that if he makes a wrong move blood will come out of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. What would be a wrong move? A wrong thought?"

When the world returns, a foul smelling, ebony-skinned dwarf is writhing on the ground toward him and demanding to be carried. He is heavy, and while no one else can see him, Max has to claim an injured back to explain his posture. With the help of his mind (a major, talkative and sensible character) he places the dwarf as Apasmara, the Hindu demon of forgetfulness and, with a little more help, remembers the CD, an Indian raga. "Lola!" The love of his life, his proudly proclaimed "destiny woman", the woman he loved and lost in less than a year; Lola has sent the raga and the dwarf to wipe his every memory of her.

As his memories flood back, short chapters shift between 1997 and 2001. Then, too, there was a book that wouldn't get started. Max recalls love at first sight, deepening as he and Lola discover a shared world of music and poetry and art. Lola Bessington, self-assured daughter of London aristocrats, half engaged to tall, handsome well-to-do Basil Meissen-Potts, is a bit resistant at first, but Max, convinced of his destiny, wins her.

But there are things she doesn't know about Max. He has a history of falling in love - and out again. "In all fairness he ought to have been wearing a sign that said, IT AIN'T NECESSARILY SO when he appeared in the Coliseum Shop in 1996 and said that Lola was his destiny woman." When he meets the brash and beautiful Lula Mae he succumbs, no, pursues temptation. His mind tries to warn him, Lola tries too, but Max wants what Max wants.

Then, having lost Lola, he's bereft. It's 1997 and suddenly his novel takes off with an artist named Moe who loses the world and acquires a dwarf named Apasmara. Max and Moe dialogue; Moe demanding to know where this dwarf came from, Max confused but sure it has something to do with Moe's as yet unknown actions. Moe wants the dwarf deleted but Max refuses. Returning to his memories, he mourns, but revels in them too. The delicious Lula Mae, the elegant Lola. Both lost. And now his own created character is breaking out of the form he has cast him in.

Once Max has lost Lola the narrative widens to include her separate life. Living in a fashionable London Buddhist retreat, she puts her well-honed mind to work, learning to compose a raga. It will take her years, but we have no doubt Lola will do it. Lola's formidable determination may yet be a match for Max's fecklessness.

Time, memory and reality become increasingly unmoored. The tone is playful and melancholy, humorous and ardent. It's full of musical and literary allusions and metaphysical conundrums. We sympathize with Max and hope he will find and win Lola, but why? He's a cad who only wants what he can't have. Can he change?

Hoban is a marvelous, imaginative and clever writer who makes a simple love story into a meditation on the nature of love, reality and memory, the creative process and spiritual wisdom. Or does he? While some readers will revel in the "emptiness is form, form is emptiness" mantra, others will begin to feel that form overwhelms substance. This reader did a bit of both. Still, it's a playful, charming and buoyant novel, beautifully written, and can be enjoyed on that level alone.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gourmet Fluff, August 22, 2004

By 

Mark Forrester "themisfit" (Hyattsville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Her Name Was Lola: A Novel (Hardcover)

I read this novel largely on the basis of an enthusiastic review in the Washington Post, and it made perfect weekend get-away reading (although it was too much fun to spread out over the whole weekend; I finished it on the first day). It is neither as ambitious nor as accomplished as the Post review suggests, but it is a delightful and intelligent comic romance.