From Publishers Weekly
Spiotta's bitingly clever debut novel sports a rare book-jacket blurb from Don DeLillo, fitting since Spiotta mines the same postmodernist territory DeLillo put on the literary map, examining the detritus and dyspepsia of consumer culture. Mina, daughter of a once-respected movie director now dodging creditors from his retreat in a yurt in Ojai, Calif., has grown up steeped in Hollywood lore. Married to a screenwriter and conducting affairs with two unsuitable men, she finds herself taking clandestine shopping trips stocking up on shoes, scandalously expensive cashmere stockings and Ultra-Red lipstick and doing "the unthinkable, the violate," walking around the drivers' city of Los Angeles. Mina's compulsively elegant boss, Lorene, who runs a chain of high-concept theme restaurants (like a '40s serviceman's club "as imagined in fifties movies about wartime serviceman's clubs") staves off her own encroaching desperation with Tactile Hue Therapy, part of a guru-prescribed regimen of "Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification." She is a former "life-stylist," having made her fortune by teaching rich men how to be interesting. Mina and Lorene, adrift in anomie despite their expensive distractions, plan to escape L.A. on a cross-country road trip to find and "rescue" Michael, Mina's disturbed brother and Lorene's former lover, who has recently checked out of a mental hospital. Lorene and Mina never manage to meet up with Michael, appropriately enough in a novel documenting missed signals and crossed paths; Spiotta's characters are so hypertuned to cultural references that they fail to read each other. A striking, original and very funny debut. (Aug.)Forecast: Strong reviews, and plenty of them, will be required to pique readers' interest in this offbeat tale. The DeLillo blurb is key, and the cool-toned, sophisticated jacket art perfectly suggests the hypermodern goings-on within.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
The atmosphere of this skillful first novel, set in Los Angeles, is at once nervy and muted, like the double-edged mood that accompanies exhaustion. There's Mina, a restaurateur who drifts among three men in search of something she knows none of them can give her; Lorene, her elegant business partner, who once worked as a life-style consultant to the newly rich, telling them what single-malt Scotch to drink and what jazz to buy; Michael, her mentally unstable brother; David, her screenwriter husband; and Max, her lover and David's best friend. All five share a fear that they don't exist unless someone is paying attention to them, but since the possibility of lasting attention seems remote, they use style and taste to give shape to their lives: "I like small, orderly things I can contain," one says, explaining why he has cut himself off from his friends. Spiotta has a gift for evoking the way lucidity comes in flashes, like something glimpsed at the edge of a movie frame, making us want to see more.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
