Lady with a Laptop [Paperback]

Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 1997

The acclaimed author of THE WHITE HOTEL and EATING PAVLOVA offers a deliciously comic novel of the literary life. "Marvelous . . . This bitingly satirical and wickedly bawdy . . . novel questions the tenuous lines between fact and fiction, the very nature of artifice". San Francisco CHRONICLE.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This satiric novel of a mediocre novelist writing a mystery novel (about a real mystery novelist who solves a real-life mystery) while giving a writer's workshop offers rich seams of comedy. On the island where the writing group holds its sessions, other workshops of extravagant New Age silliness abound, from gastric dancing to orgasmic consciousness. Discussion of a hypothetical Hollywood movie version of the novel produces a mock Oscar acceptance speech consisting entirely of crazy politically correct kowtowing. A Russian participant in the writing group expresses her desire to give up her new and discomforting Russian freedom for enslavement at some university literature department in the West. This is a delicious satire of literary endeavor. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Thomas, still best known for The White Hotel, published nearly 20 years ago, is an uneven writer whose work is never less than smoothly readable but who occasionally achieves some strikingly original and moving effects. The present novel, however (its title, if not its nature, a clear homage to Chekhov's short story "The Lady with a Lapdog"), is one of his distinctly lesser efforts, a perfectly pleasant but inconsequential picture of a group of would-be writers at a creative writing course on a Greek island and the tired English novelist who is coaching them. Thomas has some mildly sardonic fun at the expense of both class and teacher, as well as of the New Age antics of some of the other faculty; but his dramatic centerpiece, the sudden suicide of one of the more talented pupils and its impact on the others, is muffled. Oddly, the most convincing aspect of the book is the poignant onrush of nostalgic English patriotic sentiment brought on in the world-weary narrator by the memory of poet Rupert Brooke, who died and was buried on a neighboring island.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (March 5, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078670425X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786704255
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,292,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Snooze fest hidden in the guise of a Greek holiday novel., June 16, 2010

By 

W. M. Bell "Maegan Bell" (Little Rock, AR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lady With a Laptop: A Novel (Paperback)

A second-rate novelist facilitates a beginners' creative writing workshop over the summer at a New Age center on an island off the coast of Greece. The center offers courses ranging from orgasmic consciousness, gastric dancing, colonic massages, and shamanism. It is quite farcical with a continuous undercurrent of murder mystery. While the content is often interesting, one is put off by the subplots which are injected frequently throughout the book and then left completely open ended. The author's sense of humor carried much of the first half of the book but the further one read the more flat it fell. The characters you want to hear more about are often under developed and the most boring ones have whole chapters dedicated to them. My biggest issue with the book was the main character. Unfortunately there is hardly a redeeming quality about him. The man has a pretentious air about him to all of his students, then spends the rest of his time lamenting his lack of recognition in the literary world or reducing every woman in the program to nothing more than sexual objects whose worth is based on the likelihood of his shagging them. He comes off as shallow and spoiled, which is not all that attractive on a middle-aged balding Englishman. If the idea is to make a dirty old man the centerpiece of the novel, he would need to be much more likable to generate any sympathy for his fate.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Romp by a Booker Prize Winner, July 7, 2000

By 

glitzqueen (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lady with a Laptop (Paperback)

"Lady with a Laptop" is a howlingly funny sendup of the Greek island setting in which Don Thomas leads workshops and, when this manuscript was in progress, treated attendees to excerpts. There we found ourselves practicing the literary craft in sometimes tense proximity to drum-beating, vegetarian wannabe-shamans. The New Wave personalities and spirit of the place are vividly captured and, for extra spice, the author's alter-ego is faced with an entirely fictive problem: the mysterious death of the title character.