Customer Reviews

A Year in Van Nuys

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Sandra Tsing Loh's latest book reads more like a series of her hilarious essays cloaked in the guise of a novel. The novel's structure follows the character of "Sandra" through one year of her life as she struggles with writers block, perilously careens towards 36, and lives in of all places-horrors!-Van Nuys California. All of this is done with her bone dry humor in rare form, especially in the earlier half of the novel when she's expounding on the Zone diet, and Bally's Total Fitness. I loved the first two thirds, then felt it petered out a little by the end. Living in Los Angeles I found alot of the book really funny, although I don't know how people outside the city would relate. However most people in their mid thirties will find her characters plight at "what am I doing with my life" syndrome very real, funny, and a little bit scary. If you're a fan of David Sedaris, N.P.R., or just like to feel like you're hip and in the know, you'd probably enjoy this.

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book and, despite the fact that you've never met the author, felt that it was written JUST FOR YOU? Well, that's what reading A YEAR IN VAN NUYS was like for me. Never mind that I've never set foot in Van Nuys; I could relate so much to Sandra, in her mid-30s, her youth passing her by, wondering, where's that novel I should have written -- heck, where's my Oscar? I can't remember the last time a book made me laugh so hard as I was nodding, "Yes, that's so TRUE!" Sandra is the funniest woman in America and you don't have to be a Southern Californian to love this book. I'd place her right up there with David Sedaris, Merrill Markoe and Al Franken in the pantheon of Authors Who Make Me Laugh Hysterically.

After spending uncounted months commuting from my place in suburbia-like Orange County, California to my boyfriend's less than palatial abode in Van Nuys, this book came along. It had me laughing out loud from the first page (the zone-approved turkey) and wiping my eyes at the last. For anyone who's ever thought they should write a memoir, or wanted to be like or murder a sibling, or, heck, anyone who's wondered what the hell's wrong with Californians... this is a great read. Just don't try to read it on your birthday... with a handful of Tylenol PM's.

Saying that it's parochial and esoteric and only giving four stars doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it and that I don't buy every Loh. The ideal reader, however, for whom this would be a five+++
would be a female writer who lives, or has lived, in Los Angeles, watches television, and has read Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence." Not qualifying on any of the above,I missed some of the cultural references and some brilliant satirical points were lost on me. The deficiencies are mine, not Loh's.
It does not have a plot in the usual novelistic sense, except that it describes the events of a year. Some of the essays or anecdotes, such as the account of her relationship with a WEB magazine are linked. Her relationships with her husband and sister form leitmotifs. It is a collection of self-deprecating humorous pieces of the type one reads in in syndicated newspaper columns by such people as David barry or the late Irma Bombeck.
She doesn't succeed in making Van Nuys sound all that bad. I've been there once and thought it was quite nice.

Sandra is ALL over the map here with topics for discussion, and they're all funny. Here's a book you can open at just about any page and find something to make you laugh. You can read A YEAR IN VAN NUYS again and again. And it's so REAL! Laugh-out-loud funny. I liked her parody of "A Year in Provence" -- very clever. I'd like to point that you don't have to live in Southern California to get the humor. My favorite part: Her annotated illustrations, like the maps of the brain.

I've been told that it's important to "step outside your comfort zone" every once in a while, and that's exactly what I did by reading this book. The experience was, well, a little bit weird.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Sandra's female, I'm male. She's Asian-American, I'm your basic WASP-American mongrel. She's a product of life in metro LA, I'm a Midwesterner living in a small city. I don't particularly care for southern California and I'm sure she'd be bored to tears by Battle Creek, Michigan. And so forth.

For me, reading "A Year in Van Nuys" was like stumbling on a diary that someone accidently left at the airport. Sandra is spilling her guts throughout most of the book about her marriage, career problems, friends, therapist, money issues and somewhat desperate life in suburban LA. She mixes regular narrative text with e-mails, cartoon drawings, diagrams, photos, confessional essays and some other strange stuff to make it read like a confidential journal. I loved the use of "strike through" type to show earlier versions of her thought process.

Whether you like it or not, Sandra forces us to be voyeurs. That can be funny and also annoying. For example, her take on the role of religion in weddings is hilarious, as are her riffs on life as a freelance writer. On the other hand, her obsessions about eye bags and cosmetic surgery are just kind of boring. The last few pages of the book bring some sense of resolution to her free-floating self-loathing, but not enough to matter, in my opinion.

Ultimately, "A Year in Van Nuys" is a quick, silly, moderately entertaining read -- just right for that wait between flights. To find Sandra's REAL comedic talent, you'll have to listen to one of her commentaries on NPR.

I'd rate Sandra Tsing Loh's book a "qualified" 4. Sandra's a writer's writer, and we've all heard the quote:

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ~Ray Bradbury

Sandra gives us an admirable description of a year in her "fictional" life that completely illustrates the quote. However, if you've never tried to be a writer (whether you succeeded or not)...you won't get it.

Sandra's a great essay writer and a standout on NPR, but in this piece, she gets stuck horizontally on living in L.A., and aging. These semi-themes feed the underlying issue of the novel; how difficult the creative writing process can be; how obsessive are those who become a slave to it. As a result, unless you're in the book to laugh at her witticisms about living in the Valley, or you need some "women on aging" jokes, you may just hate this book!

While flying through a year in her life with hubby and near-perfect sister, while trying her hand at web writing and desperately trying not to finish a novel, Sandra dances off into flights of fancy which are illustrated in funny charts, graphs and pictures that help us visualize all of the soup floating around inside of her brain. Some would view this as a leap of faith for an ADHD female, others just think it is a clear illustration that women whine.

Hey, I'm an aging woman attempting to write, I love visualization and illustration in a story, and I even get some of the cultural references to Van Nuys, although I'm on the other coast. And I give it 4 stars. Unless you can relate or participate in at least two of these endeavors, you may want to steer clear of "A Year in Van Nuys"...which you'll consider a waste of time.

I hadn't expected to like this book as much as I did. Just after reading it, I went on a weekend with "the girls" and found myself quoting endlessly from it, including her... ...description of cheap gyms in LA, complete with the ladies in big undies loofaing in the shower ...searingly accurate account of the tossing (and non-tossing) of the conversational ball ...biting critique of You've Got Mail! Okay...so my descriptions aren't funny, but this book is. Buy it. Read it. Claim the funny stuff as your own. I HIGHLY recommend this book and will read her other books as well.

This wonderful book made me laugh out loud so many times that other people in the room began to eye me strangely. Honest, engaging and so winningly written that I read the entire book in one big delicious gulp.

This is a good - not great - book that generally entertains, but goes too far in an effort to keep the reader amused and interested. The author writes at a higher intelligence level than your typical best selling author does. The downside is that she knows it, and it effects her work. More importantly, however, is the prevalence of eye bag references that nearly made me throw this book in the trash, something I have never done in my life. Six weeks after having finished the book, I sit here editing this review with one prevailing thought in my head, the less-than-enjoyable eye bag references.

The book is presumably about a year in the life of the author. While I don't know how much resonance there is between her real life and what we read on the pages, you can tell there is some. There are too many passionate outbursts for all of this to be fiction. After all, what writer doesn't reveal some of their soul in the words they create? This is what makes it so real and easy to read. As someone once said somewhere, write what you know. But then, what if you know nothing? I digress.

The author clearly knows more than nothing and for the most part, the contents of what she does know are enjoyable to read. Some of the events in the book are resonant with things I've experienced in my own life, despite the fact that I'm a man. I'll go ahead and say the eye bags are *not* one of those things. Still, the struggle to be an author and her ultimate decision in that endeavor are thoughts close to many I have had before. Her final decision, entirely contrary to the fact she authored a book, is something I've also come to adopt. Maybe it this freedom has led her to this work? Again, I digress.

It's a refreshing book, light yet intelligent to a point. It's a quick and enjoyable read. You could certainly do a lot worse. What's more, it has diagrams for those slow on the uptake. All in all, it's generally entertaining and contains real-life insights that can be applied to life and used to learn a little about yourself. Well worth the time spent reading it.