Customer Reviews

The Quality of Life Report

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Faced with losing her apartment and the meaninglessness of her job, Lucinda Trout abandons the superficialness, craziness, and expense of NCY and moves to a small city in the midwest. She brings her career with her via freelance assignments, rents an apartment, and begins to socialize with the locals in search of "quality life."

Of course, as anyone who is not a NY writer in her late 20's knows, it isn't that easy. Lucinda's first spacious apartments stinks and has fleas, she finds the conversations of her new friends shallow, her boyfriend is a meth addict with 3 children with 3 different women, and she takes up drinking cheap grocery store wine.

The Quality of Life report veers from being laugh out loud funny, sad in its exposure of unrealized dreams, and frustrating in that the self centered and condescending lead character can't quite pull the reader all the way into her story.

Although readable, this book is disappointing. It could have been so much more, but is too rife with stereotypes, thin characters, and self involvement to do the storyline justice.

I enjoyed My Misspent Youth by this author, but this book is a stinker. It occured to me that Ms.Daum was writing a story that would be easily transfered to the screen - I think she's trying to cash in on the Bridget Jones's Diary phenomena. I say this because there are scenes in the story that are ridiculous, completely unnecessary to the plot, and simply reeking of pandering to a potential director. It often reads like a screenplay.
The worst part of this book is the writing. Where was the editor? Every lesbian character wears Birkenstocks and stands around talking about soy. Every single character in this story is a stereotype - to the extent that they cease to be believable in any sense. Everytime she turns on the radio a Peter Frampton song is playing. We get it: this is the midwest where classic rock reigns. Oddly enough, in this one little town, there are more socially conscious, politically active, intelligent individuals than would every be possible. It boggles the imagination, yet somehow these characters are written with a definite disdain - as if we're supposed to be laughing at them. The only character worthy of disdain and contempt is the protagonist, Lucinda Trout. (Trout? City girl moves to country = a fish out of water? What amazing symbolism)

Additionally, the story itself is totally unbelievable - a woman moves to the midwest and everything just falls into place. She's left New York for financial reasons, but seems to have money galore - even though her salary has been halved by her employer. She even manages to rent a house, support a man (and assumingly his kids)shop at Restoration Hardware (a super expensive store) and Pottery Barn, etc. It's absurd.
Don't waste your time. If you want to read this, check it out of the library, like I did.

I suspect Meghan Daum makes a good journalist, though I haven't read her autobiography or any of her non-fiction articles. She puts a good sentence together and has a good eye for human foibles. Unfortunately, none of this makes her a good novelist. This book was not in the slightest compelling. The main character was too cliche to be interesting and the other characters drawn too superficially to be interesting either. Much of the book centered around her crazy love for an unlikely type -- unfortunately, we never had any idea what she liked about him. Or him about her. The plot? It was more like a three-sentence pitch for a movie. The writing: adept. I hate not finishing books once I've started them but this one was hard to trudge through. About half way through I started skimming.

I wanted to, but I didn't love this book. Here's why:

1. Watery. I felt like I was reading a draft. The relationship between our protagonist Lucinda Trout (a 29 yo New Yorker who moves to the Midwest ostensibly to create slice-of-life reports for the a.m. TV show for which she works) and her boyfriend Mason seems ... translucent. Lucinda states things that come out of the left field to the reader. For example, when Lucinda claims to have fallen in love, it didn't make sense. As a reader, I hadn't yet met her boyfriend. I mean, I'd heard Lucinda talk about him. But I hadn't seen them interact. To make their relationship (and to an extent, her experience in the Midwest) real, Daum needed to

a. Condense, hone, refine. Enough with the repeat-y peat peat.
b. Show, not tell. More dialogue. More dramatic intrigue. More action, less narration.

2. NYCentric. Perhaps, as a woman who was born & raised in the Midwest, my radar was atwitter on this topic, but Daum assumed that her readers were all Manhattanites. Which, as a Midwesterner, I found condescending. Again, this problem could have been solved by a more elegant use of dialogue, e.g., phone calls to her girlfriends back home. As it is, it seems like Daum wants to tell her readers all the great things she now knows about the Midwest (people use tanning bed and get fake nails and drive trucks, etc.). Well good for you honey. Tell me something I don't know!

That said, I didn't hate this book, either. There were moments of funny, a realistic portrayal of the Midwest (meth addicts are people too, and yes, tanning beds can make you feel just as good as "personal coaches"), and Daum's Trout doesn't take her self to seriously.

Hyper New Yorker moves to America's Heartland for peace (and TV stories), and finds out it can just be as screwed up as the Big Apple. Reading that synopsis makes it sound like a winner, right? Not quite.
I liked the tone of Lucinda's TV buddies, especially because they were so clueless about the Midwest, asking for segments like book clubs and barn dances, when the people in Prairie City were more interested in a women's center. Maybe because I live in Oklahoma I can empathize, because I'm always asked stupid questions about the state (Indians still roam around? Do they live in teepees? Sigh)
One of my favorite parts is how PC people in the Midwest can be, as seen in how the Women's Center and others flock around the black woman who arrives in town midway through the book, giving her directorships and slots on the book club, when she's actually really dull and does nothing. When Lucinda is given an "intervention"-on camera, no less- she rails at the women about being hypocritical and calling the black woman their "pet", seeing as she does nothing but make them look diverse.
However, there were more parts of the book I couldn't stand. The child who can't poop on her own, and, given Ex-Lax, does it in inappropriate places, and the masturbating horse, are all scatological scenes that add nothing to the book. The "illiterate" head of Lucinda's show was not funny in the slightest. Her words come out looking like bad typos instead of actual spelling errors, far more than any person would make in the real world. I don't know where Daum learned what illiteracy is, but it's not making errors a 2nd-grader would instantly know were wrong.
The sheer stupidity of Lucinda is what gets me. She interviews many women who are trying to get off meth in the beginning of the book, scripts and shoots a show about meth abuse in the heartland, yet she's so dumb she doesn't realize the man she's living with is a crank addict? It's probably supposed to be ironic, but people that stupid generally don't live long in New York, where she's supposed to have lived for years before coming to Prairie City.
The end of the book is sad, because it seems like she's just going with what everyone else in the town is doing. She makes some changes in her life, but all in all, I couldn't relate to her. Approach with caution.

Moving from New York City to the heartland, Lucinda Trout is suddenly a fish out of water. There will be no more plot recap in this review since everyone else has already done that. Let me just say that as a reader who grew up in Kansas and Missouri and has lived for the last 20 years in Philadelphia, I loved Daum's dead-on descriptions of the East Coast and the Midwest. She manages to skewer the TV business as well as rural meth labs, earnest hefty lesbians and shallow skeletal heterosexual women, the Manhattan friend who drifts from one glamorous spot to another and the drifter boyfriend who moves from woman to woman, from A-frame (a perfect Midwestern reference!) to farm and back again. Vivid characters, snappy dialog, clever observations and some beautifully turned phrases kept me completely entertained. Apart from Lucinda's love of the word "reductive" (a flaw she has in common with the author), I found Lucinda, and her plight, fascinating.

This book is mean and not particularly interesting after the first 50 pages. The characters are cartoonish, the situations contrived, the humor at the expense of others. I enjoy Daum's essays and had looked forward to reading this novel. She should stick with essay-writing.