Customer Reviews

My Hollywood

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This is a beautiful and expansive novel about love (maternal and marital) and work (paid and unpaid). Claire, a composer, is a new mother trying to figure out how to manage the all consuming work of tending a baby and still do what sustains her--playing the cello and writing music. (Her husband Paul, an anxious TV writer-in-training, goes to work in the morning and stays there until deep in the night.) So Claire hires Lola, a Filipina nanny who is raising the money to send her youngest daughter through medical school. The two women take turns telling their stories in sharply contrasting, but equally compelling voices. Throughout, Simpson addresses vital human concerns: Who actually raises the children? Can a mostly-absent parent still be a good parent? How do children thrive and marriages endure in these various arrangements? Simpson's prose has notes of Henry Green and Virginia Woolf and even, at times, the satiric edge of Evelyn Waugh. This book is intelligent, beautifully and quite cleverly written, often funny. A literary novel for the ages.

Mona Simpson is one of the only contemporary novelists to nail the working mother species and to give a voice to the voiceless Filipina, the indispensable yet invisible Nanny. My Hollywood should be required reading for mothers, fathers, and anybody interested in the triangular relationships between children, their caretakers, and their harrowed and harassed parents. My Hollywood manages, ever so lightly, no heavy-handedness there, to give voice to the working mother's struggle--always wanting two things at once--and to the voiceless caregivers (in this case the beautifully-drawn Lola). Simpson's has mastered double narration. On one hand, we read about Claire the musician, the new mother, the woman seeking a room of her own with a crib in the corner. On the other, Lola, the Filipina nanny, sending her pennies back home, building an autonomous life for the children she has left behind and never sees. How many women like Claire do we know, still shaking off the residue of romance, self-destructive perfectionists, who make a profession out of being so hard on themselves? This novel is a must read for practitioners and theorists of the American work ethic, and how it coalesces with the myth of the perfect mother. Work is everywhere in Simpson's characters' lives--of course in husband-Paul's infernal Hollywood schedule, but also in Claire's consciousness that each minute that passes with "nothing" to show for is pure loss: (I'd blown half my time... I was a dandelion blown). What a brilliant portrait of modern time (Time had once been public, in a clock tower on a town square; everyone saw the same hour and minutes. When watches were invented...people could carry around their own time).

I'm sure that some day anthropologists will use Simpson's novel to talk about the strange historical moment when the female body is violently desexualized for the sake of the child. Her breast pumps are the symbols of a new female frontier; pumping milk, rather than oil, becomes a frantic devotional ritual. And this same pumping, when viewed from Lola's (the gloriously portrayed nanny, speaking in her own voice) point of view, reveals the tragic and preposterous aspect of sacrifice. To Lola, the near-ascetic quality of that "natural" act of breastfeeding becomes unnatural, painful, and excruciatingly lonely. Caring little for the health benefits of mother's milk, Lola observes with disbelief that formula "it is like poison to them," Simpson's formula-phobic Americans.

Virginia Woolf would have loved this novel. Claire craves a room of her own, admits that she would have so much preferred being the father than the mother. Reading My Hollywood, I kept marveling at the enormous service Simpson does by ventriloquizing the thousand voiceless house help, many working without a fixed schedule, without health care, invisible elves giving love to the children of ease, fame, and neurosis.

Another remarkable component of the book is the disposable quality of these nannies. The Lolas of the world, at one time so essential to the lonely mothers, so nurturing toward Hollywood's semi-orphaned children, suddenly become pariahs when they cannot provide the children with what Bourdieu calls academic or social distinction. Obstacles to the kid's linguistic/social advancement, these women are eventually given the sack (or the chop as Simpson puts it). The twist here is that as soon as a nanny is dismissed, it is the mother who must wave goodbye to her world, to her freedom. It is she who sacrifices the only warmth of the household for the child's future success. All kinds of divorces loom in My Hollywood, but Simpson's triumph is to present us with an entirely new kind of sentimental bereavement. Not just the disintegration of couples, the drying up of sexual passion, but the divorce between employers and employees, mothers of blood and mothers of sweat.

I hope everybody reads about Simpson's Lola and how that it is her time that give us, modern working mothers, our careers, identities, and dignity. Simpson could have made us cry, but instead she chills us. Watch for the treatment of depression in the novel. How rare it is that Prozac is prescribed to the Filipina and not the Emma Bovary doppelganger. Why does it seem so odd, as though the rich and educated have a metaphysical monopoly on anti-depressants, to witness Lola's slow descent into melancholy?

What an amazing commentary on what career means to "us" and to "them." Simpson reveals brilliantly how by the end of the novel, Lola has been contaminated by powerful American symbiosis of identity and career. Early on, Claire asks Lola what she had wanted to be. Lola is mystified. And then (what a great touch), when she goes back home to the Philippines, she is stunned that "[n]o one asks my job." She suddenly realizes that the currency of power and recognition is fundamentally different in her two distinct homes. The invisible sacrifices she has made to enable her kids' economic freedom (My children they'll never have to go anywhere. They can stay home. That is what I did for my life...) are just that--invisible.
Simpson's novel rips brilliantly into "our" working generation's undoubtedly unromantic, but prevalent adultery--not men stealing other men's wives or wives stealing husbands-- but babysitters and nannies being coveted and seduced by other parents. No longer after bimbos or Prince Charming, parents are ogling the nanny as ultimate commodity. The Lolas of Simpson's world are the great triangulated investments, the perfect and covetable reflections of success.

Also watch out for Simpson's satirical genius: UCLA babysitters refusing to wash dishes. Claire lying about money and hiding her receipts from Barney's. You will howl at the terrible Gelfond family, their twins, and the fabulous Nanny-contract (only matched in literature by Balzac's Marriage Contract). And the fantastically moving ode to ironing. Five stars!

This is a book about the modern Mom in all her over-scheduled yet scattered glory. There were definite insights in this book, and areas where the writing was outstanding. But, unfortunately, the story ultimately fell a bit flat.

Told alternately from the perspective of Claire, a composer and the mother of a young son; and Lola, the Filipina nanny whom she hires to watch her child when she is working, the story covers a lot of the challenges that the working mother faces, including the guilt involved in choosing to continue with a career when having a young child. I am not sure if the author was trying to portray the hectic and often scattered nature of the working mother when using Claire as the narrator, but I found her sections a bit serpentine and unfocused. From Lola's narrative, we also get insights into a close community of nannies who bond together and share their own challenges, which in many cases includes being working mothers themselves.

Nobody's perfect in this book. Mistakes are made on both sides of the spectrum. I think the author actually nailed a lot of the challenges to parenting these days, but overall, the story gets flat and repetitive as the book goes on. Perhaps this is because the everyday trials and tribulations of the average mom tend to be a bit boring after awhile in real life as well as on the page. Everyone's just doing what they think is best for their family, but there is really not much excitement there. The book was just okay.

I am a mom living in Hollywood - so I bought this book. I know the author is much lauded and well known but I found this book to be, well, lifeless and a bit of a bore. Sure, it's well written and has some beautifully crafted sentences but the main character's whining, her contempt for her husband and her insecurities about practically every aspect of her life were uninvolving, and even off-putting. I found it hard to care about her and her "problems". The nanny's story was slightly more interesting but is written in this confusing sort of patois, I suppose to reflect her lack of knowledge of the English language. It bordered on the condescending. All in all - not a great book and I regretted paying full price!

Mona Simpson's book, My Hollywood, explores the relationship of mothers, children and nannies in southern California, most particularly in Santa Monica. The novel is told from two vantage points, the first one Claire, a mother in her 30's with a 2 1/2 year old son, William. The other vantage point is Lola's, the Filipina nanny who works as a live-in nanny for Claire and her husband Paul during the week when she takes care of `Williamo'. Lola also has a second job on the weekends, taking care of the son of a friend of Claire and Paul's.

The novel opens with a conversation between Paul and Claire as they explore their unmarried relationship and whether they should they take it further. Both agree that a 50-50 responsibility for children and home is a must if they choose to marry and pursue their careers. Claire is a composer and Paul writes for comedy television. They use the $37,000 that Claire won from a Guggenheim grant to move to California. Once there, things change enormously from the decisions they had agreed upon prior to marriage. Paul is rarely home. He goes to work at 8:30 a.m., needing his space before and during breakfast, and he rarely returns before midnight. He is always afraid that his contract will not be renewed even when he has his own sitcom show. Claire composes music in a dingy room that is hot and lacks air conditioning. She is not feeling productive. In fact, she is angry about the obvious lack of balance in her marriage. She tries to talk to Paul about the inequities and though he agrees, he keeps putting off a time when he can change. Claire complains to a friend of hers. She is sick of eating dinner with the nanny and her two-year old. Her friend tells her that if she gets divorced she will still be eating dinner with a two year-old and perhaps not have a nanny.

The book repeats the same information several times. It is also relatively unfocused, especially during the first half. The second half focuses more on the protagonists' thoughts and inner lives and becomes somewhat more centered. However, this was not enough to revive my interest.

The real star of this book is Lola. She is the queen of the nannies, respected and looked up to by the other nannies. She trains nannies for their jobs, mentors them, and has rules that she expects nannies to live by. One is that nannies should not eat with their employers. Another is that they should not take give-aways until their employer insists several times. There are pages of rules to live by. Lola's mentor, Ruth, has a book of rules, adages, and aphorisms to which nannies must comply if they are to be successful.

There is a continual conflict between the loyalty that nannies feel towards their families and charges and the money that they expect to be paid. At one point, Lola is offered a much better paying job by her weekend family who are trying to steal her from Paul and Claire. Lola figures out the amount of money she'll be losing over a ten-year period if she stays at her current job, and it is over $70,000. However, Lola chooses to stay with her current employers because she loves `Williamo'. The nannies are also competitive about who works in the nicest home. Lola is not in the forefront here because Paul and Claire rent a place that is relatively small.

Lola's own children are in the Philippines and she grows closer to `Williamo' than she is to them. She has been in the U.S. for over six years and at one point she finds out that her husband has been unfaithful. She decides to remain in the U.S. because this is her only way of sending back thousands of dollars a year to her family, money that pays for her children's education.

It is never clear in this book what drew Claire and Paul together. Claire doesn't seem attracted to Paul at all and there is no real romantic love between them. Why they married is a mystery. The book has several gaps like this mixed with parts that are told to the reader so many times that I've memorized passages. I loved Mona Simpson's previous novel Anywhere But Here and was thoroughly looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, My Hollywood disappoints because the characters' voices don't ring true and the content of the novel meanders and is unfocused.

My Hollywood is an upstairs/downstairs look at a privileged LA family and their nanny that fails to deliver on its initial promise of vividly mingling between social classes. It begins vigorously, drawing the reader in with punchy descriptions of Claire's evolution from single creative professional to working mother and how she came to depend so blindly on Lola, the older Filipina nanny she has hired to watch her infant son William. Lola's voice seems authentic and creative in her first chapters, but her narrative quickly becomes droning and repetitive, full of noncompelling characters. Disclosure: I found myself sailing through her passages in order to catch up with the more enigmatic episodes of Claire's life, and didn't feel like I missed much. With Lola, I felt like I was stuck on a bus next to someone I have so little in common with that we had to resort to platitudes about the general human condition. Family is tough. Kids are challenging. It's important to be needed.

With a delightfully esoteric and flinty mien, Claire suffers for her art, for her mentally ill mother, and even more for her lackluster marriage. She is self reflective, but not enough to avoid a break up. But Claire has an admirable passion and commitment to her composing practice that she learns to constrict into condensed blocks of hours when William is with Lola. These are the parts of the book that really resonate with today's white, middle-class mothers-- women who were raised with massive professional ambitions by a powerful generation of feminists and feel utterly torn about staying home with kids or working.

The sub plot of Claire's husband's rise and fall as a TV writer is one of the more fascinating elements of the book, and gives those unaffiliated with "the industry" more of an idea of the high-stakes casino that is television production.

Poor little rich girl whines her way through life, moans about her inability to find time to compose (she's apparently not good at it so who cares!?!??), hires a nanny to take care of her ONE well behaved child, and then divorces her husband because he works hard. The nanny is treated so condescendingly it's unbelievable - she even thinks in pidgin English! A sorry waste of time.

Mona Simpson's "My Hollywood" was one of the richest novels I've read in years. As a mother, I found it particularly compelling to read about the lives of other mothers--some working, some not--and their caregivers in Los Angeles. The characters that Ms. Simpson creates are so real and so vivid that it was hard to put the book down. At times, I found it almost too close to home: and I found myself thinking (sometimes uncomfortably) about my own relationship with my child. The novel raises questions and issues that are familiar, but places them in a new light and allows the reader space and time to think about how the character's live, but also how we, the readers, live: what decisions we make. It was so refreshing to read such a powerful story about women and families, and one I would recommend to all of my friends.

So many critics, in the wake of Franzen's latest blockbuster Freedom, have bemoaned the fact that only male novelists write social realism in the form of grand, sweeping fiction. They must have missed this beautiful, heart-breaking, true novel with characters so real they seem to step off the page. The tense, intimate, mutually wary co-dependency of nanny and mother is perfectly drawn, and throughout, there is a broader social commentary about America, about the distance between appearances and reality, about the immigrant experience, about modern marriage (much more believably than Franzen, by the way), about every micro-trend and fad in childcare and education, about money and what it means to us, and above all, work and how we derive our sense of meaning from it. What's really amazing is that Simpson manages to pack all this in while focusing almost entirely on matters domestic, yet it never feels contrived. This is a book people will and should be reading long after Freedom (don't get me wrong: it's a diverting entertainment and I enjoyed it, but it's as deep as a well-made HBO program) sinks into obscurity. Everything about My Hollywood -- plot construction, panoramic scope, the characters' voices, the accumulation of detail and nuance -- is extraordinary, particularly because its subject -- children, and how they shape women's lives -- is so very ordinary. I don't think Simpson got her due for this novel, which is far superior both in reach and execution than anything she has written before, and definitely far superior to any other literary fiction published this year. One thing that makes this novel so wonderful is its blend of humour and authorial tenderness for her characters -- Simpson creates empathy for these truly multi-dimensional, flawed women, and you feel bereft, as though you've lost friends, when the novel ends. If it were possible to give more than five stars, I would.

My Hollywood seems like an anthropological study as much as a novel. The subjects of the study are affluent wives of men in tv and film and the Filipina nannies who take care of their children. Detailed accounts of parenting activities including feeding, carpooling and disciplining fill the book, which alternates from the first person point of view of Claire, a Hollywood wife, and Lola, her nanny. Taking care of small children can sometimes be boring, and reading Simpson's rendition of an English-as-a-second-language speaker's detailed account of taking care of small children is even more boring, especially when it is almost incomprehensible. Spoken language that is made intelligible with gesture and inflection does not do well here on the written page. And glaring inconsistencies in Lola's language abilities rang false.

Nonetheless, halfway through the novel, all the dailyness of the mothers' and children's lives becomes engaging and catch at one in the way family life does and the characters take over the momentum. The artists in the story--mostly husbands but also, Claire, a composer--and their ambitions offer a side drama. Accounts of Hollywood parties, TV shoots, Emmys ceremonies, New York concerts are all delivered with something of the anthropologist's curious detachment. Cattiness, competition and envy are presented without judgment in both the world of making art and the world of homemaking.