Customer Reviews

Lightning Field: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lightning Field is as nuanced and sublime a portrait of life and lifers in contemporary LA as can be found. It is alternately grim and hilarious, as the three protagonists, almost artifacts themselves, stray through the land of artificial. Throughout, old hollywood ghosts and archaic american slang (Eureka, for example) punctuate what is really a document of today. Other old things invested with new life or cast in bright new light: 60's hippie/drug culture-- the "new age," and the library of black and white and technicolor tombs that innundate Mina, our central charater, and her brain.

The characters are not innoculated against the late capitalist infrastructure that surrounds them, and either are we. The evidence for this is in the author's immense talents at rendering comedy from the blight of shopping and the ugliness of a cool chain of concept restaurants that seem dreadful and unreal. Wool stockings and make-up never sounded so fascinating.
The novel assails our current dilema with brilliant turns of wit--the author manages to nail the protagonists and the reader with the sharpest of bullets.

The title refers, tragically and with echoes of the Catcher in the Rye, to the unattainable-- in fact it refers to the unnameable even.

Every once in a while I read a book that leaves me changed. Lightning Field is one of those rare books that is so disturbingly refreshing I cannot help but be affected by it. Spiota's style is wonderfully indescribable. While most first time authors weave a story of stolen stylistic interpretations, Spiota's style is all her own. The haunting ending might leave some literary fuddy-duddies asking "Why?" But those of you that are tired of reading the same "written formula" in book after uninventive book will breath a sigh of relief. This book is ground breaking and will leave you thinking...for a long time.

I found 'The Lightning Field' to be delightful. Dana Spiotta has truly burst onto the literary stage with all the wit of an Updike or Armistead Maupin, the pace and intricacy of a Robert Altman screenplay and the subtlety and nuance of Gore Vidal. In short, fantastic, witty, insightful on the many facets of our complex urban lives and loves, and a real stonker of a read. Please please tell us you're working on a sequel, Dana Spiotta!

Dana Spiotta's Lightning Field is an interesting first novel that initially seemed a little disjointed to me, but then I realized that the disjointedness is the whole point. The novel follows three women in contemporary LA. Mina works at Lorene's upscale, super successful restaurants, is having affairs with two men and is perpetually late because she won't ride in cars any more. Lorene has her own issues, trying to find some sort of satisfaction through new age remedies like spiritual exfoliation. Lisa cleans Lorene's house, trying to scrape by and support her five year old twins and survive her marginally successful marriage. Lisa is the only "real" character in the novel, although Mina and Lorene certainly are believable. Their successes and LA have removed them from what is real, from what Lisa's struggles are all about. The disjointedness in the novel only highlights the disjointedness of Mina and Lorene's life. The writing is marvelous in this novel; it's quick-witted and entertaining, while also being thought-provoking. There are many layers in Lightning Field, enjoy discovering them.

This book makes me wonder why Dana Spiotta didn't start writing books sooner. Lightning Field establishes its identity as a novel through a collection of references, much as the main character, Mina, thinks of her identity as if it "were a collection of references" from the history of motion pictures. The book works like a slice-of-life movie, following the characters through revealing references that develop them as characters one can care for. Lightning Field is full of juxtapositions of money and "negative money," of walking in a town built for cars, of sanity and insanity, and of the beautifully crafted details central to each of the characters.

If, as Spiotta suggests, the truth of all things is revealed in there destruction, then we certainly see the truth of the characters in Lightning Field, as she skillfully constructs, destroys, and reconstructs these characters!...

Autobiographical, revealing, intimate, and touchingly confessional, like many first novels. Do we want to peek at the internal, frustrated and narcissistically driven lives of the sophisticated LA fashionable? You bet. Odd thing is Dana comes off likeable and sympathetic, think Shopgirl, think Pretty Woman. Do we have another voice for the romantically overstimulated hot set? Think High Fidelity and John Cusack. We'll wait and see. Look what happened to Michael Chabon with this kind of introspective, self-examination. Pulitzer Prize. Go Dana. Keep it up. I will buy the next one, gladly. You folks out there with your own literary minded yearnings - buy Dana's book. She could use the encouragement, the admiration, the movie deal.

A slick, funny and sentient first novel about the waking dream that is Los Angeles and three women's respective pursuits for meaning within its lonely and distorted Hollywood hall of mirrors.

This book should be a shoo-in for the PENN/Faulkner award, and a welcome companion to the works of Don Delillo, Joan Didion and Brett Easton Ellis.

On the basis of having just finished this first novel by Dana Spiotta, I must say I'm really looking forward to reading her second & third novels (so far). I don't need to spell out the ways that Spiotta is brilliant, because the other positive reviews on this page are spot on: check out, in particular, the one quoting "bang & banish" and the one about the "objective correlative"--an apropos concept not only for the artwork of the lightning field that provides the title but also for the movies streaming through the overstuffed brains of bright Angelenos (Angelenas?) like Mina and Lorene. Even the qualified and negative reviews are helpful in making your decision about whether to read this book, because if you're not the sort of person who enjoys an in-depth exploration of the quirky lives of intelligent yet shallow inhabitants of La-La Land, maybe you shouldn't bother with _Lightning Field_. Think again, though, if you have enjoyed movies or T.V. shows about L.A. ("Six Feet Under," for example, I thought about more than once as Spiotta delved into Mina's complex family dynamics & her equally complex sex life.) You might find, as I did, you have something to learn from Spiotta. Just because the characters are oddly constricted in their outlook on reality--perhaps I should say "reality" =laugh= --doesn't mean the author is!

I'll take issue with just two opinions posted in the customer reviews to date:
(1) that Spiotta's male characters have no depth: we may not learn as much about them as the three female principals, but they each get their unique and nuanced slice of the novelistic pie. Even the male walk-ons are vividly human.
(2) that Spiotta's style isn't like anyone else's: I found her prose very reminiscent of Don DeLillo (e.g., _White Noise_) and even somewhat like Bret Easton Ellis (e.g., _Glamorama_) for the first 50 pages or so. But gradually Spiotta shakes off her influences and develops her own voice. And I can't help nothing how delightful it is to finally (finally!) find a FEMALE fiction writer who is in the same league as DeLillo, a writer who has a female perspective on the experiences of women, both cultural and biological, in our fraught society. (Yes, there's Joan Didion, but her good stuff is nonfiction--a different sort of animal.)

Last but not least, let me give you a quotation: "The walk up Franklin facing the Hollywood Hills was eerie and quiet this early. There were hot, dry blasts of wind, the late-summer Santa Anas that made the city feel strange. Hot paradoxical winds--winds that made you sweat. Mina felt the sirocco blast of air, an undercurrent of desert. Perfect weather for an exit. The air felt heavy and pushy, hot, sudden northern blows that Raymond Chandler called red winds. Well, he ought to know, and it felt that way, red and hot and skewed, as if it might blow the pages of a calender back, the introduction of a flashback, an incantation to time slips. Mina stood at Hollywood and Franklin and looked back dowm, listening to tiny pieces of paper swirling in the street. The dawn light deflected and diffused, a fighting orange, a growing umbery red. The wind was red because you could feel the tabloid bloodrush of the city in it, a cracked Southern California creepiness that came from desert and sun and all its golden promise. You could feel Manson at the edges, and fires and riots combusting from within, and the funny way the city always seemed primed for retribution."

A city that offers promise but is primed for retribution...but no redemption, not yet at least. That also describes the novelist, I think. I can't wait to read her next one!

Life and reality are all relative in the city that never weeps. Los Angeles may lack a soul, but Spiotta gets to the heart of her characters, and she does so with biting humor, honesty, and
irony. Buy this book, it is GREAT reading!

a decent, quick read. yes, she has read "white noise" a few times.
two issues:
--the "this is how LA people are" bit got a tired; in a 220 page novel maybe a little less space could be spent on the obvious revelations that they have breast implants, they relate real life to the movies and they eat those "wacky" foods.
--towards the end of the book the author was still giving us back story rather than plot/character pay off.