The Quality of Life Report [Paperback]

meghan daum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2004

Meghan Daum’s unforgettable debut novel brings her sharp wit and courageous social commentary to the story of Lucinda Trout, a New York television reporter in search of greener pastures. Moving to the slower- paced, friendly, and vastly more affordable Midwestern town of Prairie City, Lucinda zealously creates a series of televised reports for her New York audience about her newfound quality of life. But when Lucinda falls for eccentric local Mason Clay, her naïveté about the real world leads her down an unexpected path, where she encounters, among other things, a drafty old farmhouse filled with children, an ever-growing menagerie of farm animals, and the harshest winter the region has seen in twenty years. In other words, simplicity just isn’t as simple as it is cracked up to be, and "quality of life," Lucinda learns, is much more complicated than she ever imagined.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Meghan Daum's first book, the essay collection My Misspent Youth, was written with effortless humor and excoriating insight. This was a writer who made fun of everything, most especially herself. Humor and self-knowledge infuse her debut novel, The Quality of Life Report. Fans of Daum's essays probably know that her unworkable, expensive New York lifestyle led her to move to the Midwest. Same goes for the fictional Lucinda Trout, a New York TV producer who, while on assignment, falls in love with the town of Prairie City. Daum, with typical acuity, is wise to her character's real motivations for moving to the country: she wants to be a better person, and believes the Midwest will do the trick: "This was, after all, serious country. The real heartland, the plains. It was Willa Cather-novel serious. It was Sissy Spacek-movie serious and documentary-film-about-poor-conditions-in-meat-packing-plants-serious." Lucinda soon discovers that she's not immune to the less-than-perfect aspects of Prairie City living, and acquires a boyfriend of questionable hygiene and judgement; a rambling, isolated farmhouse that looks like the set to a Sam Shepard movie but is impossible to heat; and a tanning-bed tan and a set of false nails that are the region's signature style. The plot of the novel unwinds rather messily, and Daum doesn't always seem in control of her material. But she never lets Lucinda off the hook, and that's the key to the book's success. Daum has given her heroine a voice that is prickly, a little ruthless, and lovably vulnerable all at once. We don't always respect Lucinda, but we're pretty sure we'd be friends with her. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Daum's winning first novel (after the 2000 essay collection My Misspent Youth) depicts the transformation of Lucinda Trout from a semisuccessful, 29-year-old New York City television morning-show reporter into a full-blown Midwesterner. She flees the big city (and her tiny apartment and domineering, illiterate boss) for wind-swept Prairie City, a smallish town full of affordable real estate somewhere in the flyover zone, promising to send back a series of TV segments dubbed "Quality of Life Reports," intended to demonstrate that wholesome, smalltown life still exists. But once she settles in, she finds all is not necessarily as expected in the heartland: the locals, though well-meaning, don't live up to the clich‚ (nearly everyone has multiple children by multiple partners; a local lesbian singing duo calls itself Estrogen Therapy) and Lucinda manages to produce only a handful of dreadful dispatches. Instead of advancing her career, she surprises her cynical self by shacking up in a remote farmhouse with an irresponsible, faux-Sam Shepard type while helping to care for his three kids, and trying to make it through a long, cold winter with an inadequate car and little money. Though it sounds grim, Daum never lets it get maudlin, and Lucinda's determination to make everything work-the farm, the man, the kids, her career-makes for some brilliant flashes of comedy. By the end, Lucinda may not have found love, or necessarily a better life, but she does learn to relax a bit and take things as they come. Though the love story occupies center stage, this is not mere chick lit, and men will enjoy it, too. It is a confident first novel, full of wit and deft social criticism, often very funny and frequently wise. Daum is a rising star.
Copyright 2003 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: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014200443X
• ISBN-13: 978-0142004432
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (106 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #241,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth and the novel The Quality of Life Report, a New York Times Notable Book. Her column on political, cultural, and social affairs appears weekly in the Los Angeles Times and is distributed nationally through the McClatchy news service. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life, and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well crafted, but mixed signals, May 26, 2003

By 

C. Ebeling "ctlpareader" (PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Quality of Life Report (Hardcover)

Like other readers, I pounced on this the minute it was published because I admire Daum's first book, the essay collection titled MY MISSPENT YOUTH. Like other readers I find THE QUALITY OF LIFE REPORT somewhat problematic. My biggest problem is its strength: I found its unapologetic lessons on living with the choices we make in life dispiriting. The critics who recommend it commend its comic dimensions, which are there, but the projectory of the protagonist's experience in dumping the unaffordable life of Manhattan for the affordable life of a prairie town in the Mid-West is sodden with dramatic irony, not big laughs. HOUSE OF MIRTH and SISTER CARRIE came to mind, not VANITY FAIR or anything Austen. While the book does not end tragically, it lacks the life affirmation that should come in the end of a novel labeled "comic." Another problem is, the comedy is supposed to turn on the contrast between the Manhattanite-Ralph Lauren vision of the country life and what country life and folk really are, but there isn't enough on the Manhattan side, other than yearning references to space, affordability, Willa Cather, Sam Shepard, and Jessica Lange movies to balance the messy and ultimately undefined reality of the country.

This is well crafted and, in true Daum fashion, well-observed. There are comic elements. If the book suffers from any one thing, it is that it plays too much by the workshopped rules of contemporary American literary fiction which tend to keep writers sitting on their hands. There should be more anger, more outright hilarity, the rhythm should be punchier.

One last problem with this story: knowing that Daum makes no apologies for mining her own life for her work, knowing that she did move to Nebraska and wrote some essays for an e-zine that translated directly into the fiction, I have to ask, did she really live out this entire story? Was she really that dumb about the guy? I want her to be as smart as her sentences. Not all vision has to come from the school of hard knocks and bad choices.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to like it more..., January 31, 2004

By 

Diane Moore - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Quality of Life Report (Hardcover)

I am familiar with Meghan Daum having been part of the "Self" generation, and I have always liked her honest, witty articles in that magazine. I was tempted to read her book for that reason, and to be honest, I liked the idea of taking yourself out of the rat race, to try to find something more meaningful. The concept worked, but the book was a little shaky for me.
Lucinda Trout was a 20 something "Lifestyle Correspondent" who went to Prairie City orginally to interview meth addicts who were also housewives. Apparently, they would do it, lose weight, and even have a very clean house. Lucinda fell in love with the simplicity of the place, the natural beauty, and said goodbye to New York, at least for a year, so she could broadcast her "Quality of Life Report," to New Yorkers, to show them that it is possible.
While she is there, she meets Mason, a 40 year old "Jeremiah Johnson/Brad Pitt" type, and finds herself intrigued by him, so she accepts his proposal to go out sometime. This man has three kids by three different women, and lives in a little cabin in the woods.
So, she starts to date him and ignores other men that have been interested in her. She starts to get acquainted with his kids, and before you know it, they move in together! Unfortunately, this is where I started to lose interest because the book starts to drag in unimportant scenes and details.
Such as: Lucinda starts to get involved with this women's group talking about "empowerment" and reading inspiring books. Mason starts to develop a "problem," but Lucinda stays with him and doesn't seem to be quite affected by it. She doesn't have too much of a life after that, and her boss Faye's (5'11 and weighing 119) emails are irritating because they are trying to say that she's illiterate. I got that point a long time before. There is also too much obsession with weight in this book and too many stereotypes: about midwesterners, about lesbians, and about people in general, which started to grate on my nerves.
I gave it three stars because I spent a couple hours in a coffee shop engrossed in the first 150 pages, but after that, I kind of lost the point of the whole book (and maybe she did too.) I will read her books (or essays) again, but I wished that this one had held my interest.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Culture shock, May 8, 2005

By 

Lleu Christopher "www.liminalworlds.com" (Hudson Valley, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Quality of Life Report (Audio Cassette)

The Quality of Life Report is a witty and sometimes hilarious look at the culture shock experienced by a New Yorker who moves to the Midwest. Lucinda Trout is an assistant producer for a New York magazine-style television program. Her moody and caustic boss Fay comes across as a caricature at times, but is nonetheless a very funny parody of an urban elitist hipster (this, despite the fact that she can't spell). Lucinda is dissatisfied with her life for several reasons. She is a single woman in a city with a dearth of available men. She can only afford a tiny apartment in Manhattan. Finally, she is tired of the shallowness of her career and lifestyle. These facts conspire to hatch a new plan in Lucinda's mind --move to a town thousands of miles away and report back to New Yorkers in a "Quality of Life" report. So she relocates to Prairie City (a fictional place in an unspecified Midwestern state) and begins with a series on meth addiction. From there, she meets an odd assortment of characters, including Mason, who becomes a romantic interest, and sort of settles down while coping with a series of increasingly catastrophic misadventures.

I really enjoyed Meghan Daum's writing style and subject matter. I must also give credit to Johana Parker, the narrator of the audiobook, who does a superb job in capturing the personalities of the various characters. I laughed more listening to this book than I have in a long time. I liked the way she satirizes both big city pretensions and small town provincialism. She also makes some keen observations about the impact a different landscape has on peoples' lives. The vast open spaces of Prairie City present a dramatic contrast to the claustrophobic atmosphere of Manhattan.

I do have a few criticisms of Daum's typecasting and the way the story unfolds. For one thing, Prairie City in some ways seems more like a hip college town than a middle American small city. Daum focuses on a very specific subculture within this Midwestern city, one that is populated by liberal activists, folk singers and gays, while the wider, more traditional and conservative element is downplayed. This has the effect of diluting the culture shock --many of these Prairie City denizens seem more like people who, like Lucinda, moved there from a big city than homespun rural people. Lucinda's boyfriend Mason is a notable exception to this, and he is a complex and believable character. Then there are the local people Lucinda encounters grocery shopping, who Daum caricatures as mostly disfigured cretins.While some of these descriptions are very funny, albeit in a non-PC way, I also think they tend to undercut the book's main slant, which is biased in favor of Prairie City as opposed to New York. The audiobook contains a very interesting interview with the author at the end, in which Daum discusses the partly autobiographical nature of the novel. She herself had relocated to Nebraska while writing the book. I think the interview, as well as the novel itself, reveals Daum's ambivalence about rural vs. city life. On the one hand, she is drawn to the sense of community, roots and commitment that the Midwestern small-town life represents. On the other hand, she admits to having the writer's sense of being an outsider. So for people like Daum, and her fictional counterpart Lucinda, life in a place like Prairie City can never be what it is for the bona fide locals. I found the book compelling enough that I inquired about her other writing, which includes a book of essays called My Misspent Youth. She also has a personal website in which she reveals, quite significantly considering the topic of The Quality of Life Report, that she has recently relocated to Los Angeles.

The Quality of Life Report is an intelligent, entertaining look at some of the issues that modern, multicultural America has to deal with. I look forward to reading more of Ms. Daum's work.