Any Place I Hang My Hat: A Novel (Paperback)

by Susan Isaacs (Author) "I stepped off the elevator right into the entrance gallery of the co-op..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Thom Bowles, Aunt Linda (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
A political reporter in her late 20s goes in search of the mother who abandoned her when she was a baby in this jaunty if rather jerky 10th novel by Isaacs (Long Time No See; Red, White, and Blue; etc.). Amy Lincoln was brought up in the projects by her Grandma Lil, a leg waxer and devoted Falcon Crest viewer; her amiable father, Chicky, spent most of Amy's childhood in prison on a series of minor theft raps. A boarding school scholarship rescues Amy from lower-class oblivion; she goes on to Harvard and Columbia, then lands a job at In Depth, a highbrow weekly. Upbeat and self-deprecating, Amy spends little time bemoaning her past, but an encounter with college student Freddy Carrasco, who claims he's the illegitimate son of a Democratic presidential candidate, gets Amy wondering where her own mother might be. While advising Freddy how to approach his father, she uses her reporting skills to track down her elusive mother. The political subplot is anticlimactic—Amy doesn't even get a scoop—and Amy's eventual reunion with her mother, revealed to be a chilly suburban housewife, is credibly if rather disappointingly subdued. The parade of lavishly and loopishly described secondary characters and gossipy New York scene-setting give the novel its zing; Amy's rocky relationship with her documentary filmmaker boyfriend provides a jolt of romantic excitement and a happy ending.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
Nobody does smart, gutsy, funny, sexy dames better than Susan Isaacs. Her novels are the literary equivalent of a Myrna Loy movie, except that Isaacs's typical heroine is an up-from-the-working-class Jewish gal whose self-deprecating humor and wry view of social pretense betray an unease with the WASP world of privilege that the shiksa Loy's characters never felt.

The latest terrific Isaacs novel, Any Place I Hang My Hat, confronts, more directly than any of her previous books, the psychological fallout from a classic Isaacs family situation: that of a daughter who parents her parents. Isaacs's dames almost always have more on the ball than their fathers and, particularly, their mothers. Examples of this mother-as-child turnaround in her fiction range from the painfully prosaic (a mother with Alzheimer's disease in the murder mystery After All These Years) to the extraordinary (an alcoholic and promiscuous dumb bunny of a mother in the superb World War II suspense story/social drama Shining Through.)

Her latest heroine, Amy Lincoln (yes, she's Jewish, despite that moniker), boasts more than the usual quota of deeply flawed parents and guardians. She all but raised herself in a low-income project in New York City. Her paternal grandmother was her legal guardian, but the late Grandma Lil (who worked for years as a "substitute waxer, ripping the hair off the lips, legs, and random chins of the famous and the merely rich at Beauté, an uptown, upscale beauty salon") was not, as Amy admits, "the brightest bulb on the menorah."While she was growing up, Amy's loving screw-up of a dad, Charles "Chicky" Lincoln, was gone a lot, sojourning in the slammer for robbery, assault and other missteps. Amy's mother, Phyllis, who's the object of Amy's fantasies, was a teenager when, according to Lincoln family lore, she called out to her baby daughter, "See you later, sweets" and walked out the apartment door, never to return.

Still, through hard work, brainpower and a talent for ingratiating herself with powerful people, Amy has made something of herself. During her student years, a sympathetic social worker helped her get a scholarship to Ivey-Rush Academy, a tony girls' boarding school that was out to diversify its student body. ("Once I got there I realized that about two-thirds of the nonwhites in the [school brochure] photo must have been hired for the day from some Diversity, Our Specialty model agency.") Currently, the 28-year-old Amy works as an associate editor at a serious (no gossip, no photos) political magazine called In Depth. ("If In Depth had an escutcheon, it would bear the words NULLA SCIENTIA SINE TAEDIO on a field of bleakest gray. No knowledge without boredom.")

The plot gets rolling when Amy shows up at a snooty fundraiser for Sen. Thomas Bowles of Oregon, an outside candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The event, hosted by a men's footwear magnate and his missus at their mammoth Central Park West co-op, is disrupted when a young man dodges security and announces that he's the senator's out-of-wedlock son. Although the story lies outside her journalistic purview, Amy finds herself drawn to the plight of the party crasher. His desperate need to make contact with his alleged biological father reawakens Amy's nascent longings to find her mother.

Thus ensues a search that roams from the Royal Athens Diner in Queens ("The sort of place with a menu longer than the complete works of Dickens"), where Amy grills a reluctant "Chicky" about the details of his brief marriage to her runaway mother, to a gated retirement community in Florida where Amy tracks down her maternal grandmother. Her yearnings to find a family of her own are intensified by a painful breakup with her longtime boyfriend, by the unreliable companionship provided by her much-married best friend, "Tatty" (a society cake decorator), and by Sept. 11. Like so many other New York writers, Isaacs clearly feels compelled to register the horror of that day, but she wisely does so with restraint.

"How the hell can someone not have any feeling or . . . even curiosity about a human being he [or she] was responsible for giving life to?" That's the central question of this merrily observant, moving -- and, as always with Isaacs -- very entertaining novel. Sen. Bowles's supposed son shouts out the question directly; Amy asks it silently and constantly as she penetrates the mystery of her mother's disappearing act. Any Place I Hang My Hat testifies to the importance of family in an uncertain, sometimes terrifying world. Refreshingly, the novel expands its understanding of family to include those bound together by affinity as well as blood.

Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743272307
• ISBN-13: 978-0743272308
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #971,816 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's hard to believe that over 25 years have passed...., October 19, 2004

By	L. Quido "quidrock" (Tampa, FL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Any Place I Hang My Hat: A Novel (Hardcover)

.....since author Susan Isaacs penned her "Compromising Positions" yarn about a middle-aged suburban housewife. In THAT book, which may seem ordinary today, Isaacs broke
a lot of rules. She wrote about the suburban mom vs. working woman in a manner that poked fun at both. She let her heroine have an adulterous fling, and, somehow, it seemed
all right in a day and age when the sexual revolution was just something hippies were involved in. Over the years, in nine novels (ten, now!) Isaacs has given me much pleasure and literally has me stop and say more than once throughout each book-"that's happened to me...". My personal favorite of Isaac's novels is "After All These Years", but, then, I never met an Isaacs novel I didn't love.

I credit Susan Isaacs with starting the "chick lit" era, and she is a master. Her novels don't just make light of women facing issues, they generally are themed for a woman who is just discovering a whole lot about herself that she never knew. "Any Place I Hang My Hat" is no exception, although the heroine, Amy Lincoln (a 30-something Jewish-Italian New Yorker from the slums, with a missing mother who walked off and left her and a father ("Chicky") who has lived a life incarcerated, on and off)doesn't realize right away that she's destined to try to find her true self.

Naturally, Amy's used her wits and her knack for hard work and fitting in to go first to an exclusive boarding school, all expenses paid, then on to Harvard and Columbia to study journalism. She's a political writer for "In Depth" - a quality magazine with an educated following, and she's been involved for more than two years with a documentary
filmmaker, John Orenstein. She's got a longer relationship, for a decade and a half, with rich, exotic Tatty, her best
friend. The two met in boarding school when Tatty insulted her and Amy retaliated by punching her in the mouth. Tatty naturally does not have to work for a living, but chose a career in gourmet occasion cake making, after her two marriages failed. Isaacs normally draws me in with a more middle-aged heroine, but in the brilliant little journey that Amy makes to find herself in the novel, we quickly learn that she has an old soul.

Involved in the early part of the Democratic run for a presidential candidate, with a clever mix of real and imagined candidates, Amy's struck by the parallel between a young Hispanic man who crashes a fund-raiser, claiming the blueblooded Senator who is running for office is his father. Amy's own life has been lived trying not to speculate on why and how her mother, Phyllis, left her in the care of crazy Grandma Lil and jailbird Chicky. Phyllis never once looked back, and Amy has to decide - does she want to find Phyllis and find the answers to all those questions or is it just safer to leave the genie in the bottle?

Interspersed with the quest for her identity are the often humorous anecdotes of Amy's struggle with editorial control at the magazine, and her on and off again romance
with John. Warning: there is a broken heart that really leaves you feeling bereft in this novel.

In the concluding chapters, I will admit to tears, because Isaacs truly engaged me in her character, and never went over-the-top for her laughs. Indeed, Isaacs practices wit more than humor, romance more than sexual heat, and contemporary writing more than groundbreaking plotting. Reviewing the above, you may yawn and think it's just another plot that's been done before, but you haven't counted on Isaacs' style and way with a phrase or a concept. Here she has Amy assess her life:

"I could fit in anywhere: With all the kids on the bus going upstate to visit their fathers in prison. With all the Ivey girls and the guys they hung with. In a government seminar at Harvard. Drinking with the Democratic powers-that-be in Chicago. Except when you could theoretically live a thousand different lives, how do you pick the one where you belong?"

Join Isaacs and Amy for a journey of discovery, and enjoy the wit, charm, warmth, and ultimately and unfortunately, the end of a smart new novel. Isaacs only averages
one novel every 2.5 years. That's way too few with too much space between them, for my taste. Thus, I pay full price whenever I see she's got a new one on the shelves....believe me, "Any Place I Hang My Hat", was worth every penny!

Enjoy it!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better and better and better . . ., November 1, 2004

By	Michael K. Smith (Gonzales, Louisiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Any Place I Hang My Hat: A Novel (Hardcover)

Issacs's novels aren't mere replays of one another. The protagonist of each is a woman, but they're not "women's novels" -- or not merely that, anyway. This one isn't a mystery, as some of her best have been, but it's certainly suspenseful. Thirty-year-old Amy Lincoln ("no relation") is a more-than-competent New York political analyst and journalist at IN DEPTH, a magazine so serious it doesn't run pictures at all. Despite her degrees from Harvard and Columbia School of Journalism, she grew up in the projects, the daughter of a mostly likeable but only semi-successful small-time criminal and a mother who disappeared when she was a few months old, dumping her in the reluctant lap of her Grandma Lil, a part-time leg-waxer. Her background left her with a rather confrontational style and very chary of commitment in relationships, even though for two years she's been with the pretty much terrific John Orenstein, a documentary film maker who pushes all her passion buttons but with whom she is convinced she ought to break up. But all that is just the background to this multilayered story. While covering a private money-raiser by a presidential candidate, she witnesses a young, personable gate-crasher's claim to be the senator's illegitimate son. As she gets involved, against her better ethical judgment, with his quest for acceptance, she comes to the realization that she must also uncover the truth about her own mother and the theft of a diamond ring that sent her father to jail for the first time. She's an expert researcher and (speaking as someone in a similar line of work) I found the process fascinating. But Amy's search is only the means to discovering who she is, whether she's really her mother's daughter in terms of bent psychology, and what to do about John. The story is set, rather pointedly, against the backdrop of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, but I'm not sure I see the relevance. And there are also frequent flashback references to the events of September 11, as is probably inevitable for any future novel set in present-day New York City, but at least they play some part in the characters' personal lives. This certainly isn't a "funny" book, but Isaacs's dry wit and droll capsule descriptions add a leavening of humor that keeps things on an even keel. And her spot-on depictions of the supporting characters are marvelous. Every novel this author writes is better than the one before.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing book, June 11, 2006

By	Fastwalk (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Susan Isaacs usually offers a fast but entertaining read, with astute commentary mixed with tales of social climbing and coupling. This book flops, though. The writing is turgid. The plot is uninteresting. The characters never come to life and are not believable. Isaacs' own social climbing and insecurities are fully on view.

In this novel, Isaacs' protagonist was plucked from a housing project and selected for an elite boarding school based on her brains. She then went to Harvard. When the novel opens, she is a journalist for a serious political magazine. Nothing this woman says or does shows any sign of intellect. I could not picture her as a respected political writer, or as she herself puts it, "a better-than-competent journalist and political analyst" (p.301). The reader would need to be shown these skills. Believe me, we aren't.

The protagonist's father, Chicky, a felon with a heart of gold, is equally implausible. Freddy, an alleged resident of the barrio, talks in an absurd manner. What Latino teenager says so-and-so "has been conferencing with my father's lawyer"?

I also was put off by Isaacs' ethnic chauvinism. A previous reviewer mentioned how this played out in terms of Mid East politics. I also observed it in the protagonist's many put downs of WASPS. It's OK to make fun of others, in a light-hearted way, but this had a mean-spirited quality, including discussion of how a blue-eyed man could not be attractive to the protagonist. Really? The color of a person's eyes is decisive in this regard?

This book is poorly put together, badly plotted, and without true character development. It's not even funny. The main character is annoying and narcissistic. If I had to guess how this book came about, I would say that Isaacs got so big in the sales department that her publisher let her venture forth with this, without the editing that's probably saved her in the past.