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Bezig met laden... Lightning Fielddoor Dana Spiotta
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The Los Angeles Dana Spiotta evokes in her bold and strangely lyrical first novel is a land of Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles, a great centerless place where chains of reference get lost, or finally don't matter. Mina lives with her screenwriter husband and works at her best friend Lorene's highly successful concept restaurants, which exploit the often unconscious desires and idiosyncrasies of a rich, chic clientele. Almost inadvertently, Mina has acquired two lovers. And then there are the other men in her life: her father, a washed-up Hollywood director living in a yurt and hiding from his debtors, and her disturbed brother, Michael, whose attempts to connect with her force Mina to consider that she might still have a heart -- if only she could remember where she had left it. Between her Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification therapies and her elaborate devotion to style, Lorene is interested only in charting her own perfection and impending decay. Although supremely confident in a million shallow ways, she, too, starts to fray at the edges. And there is Lisa, a loving mother who cleans houses, scrapes by, and dreams of food terrorists and child abductors, until even the most innocent events seem to hint at dark possibilities. "Lightning Field" explores the language tics of our culture -- the consumerist fetishes, the self-obsession and the eeting possibility that you just might have gotten it all badly wrong. In funny, cutting, unsentimental prose, Spiotta exposes the contradictions of contemporary lives in which "identity is a collection of references." She writes about overcoming not just despair but ambivalence. Playful and dire, raw and poetic, "Lightning Field" introduces a startling new voice in American fiction. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.3)
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Do you like bad Don Delillo? Because I'm ambivalent even about moderately good Don Delillo, but Spiotta here has reproduced everything that's unpleasant about his worst books--the stylized but also fakely-naturalized dialogue about ideas that aren't interesting; the random fragmentation of text with no real payoff; the slickness. It's icky. It's not very interesting. It contains what felt like an infinite number of sentences starting "She [verb]", followed by another short sentence starting the same way, followed by another short sentence starting the same way. I assume this choice was meant to do something for me, but it did not.
LF is interesting, though, as a kind of half-way house between the hoary old pomo Delillo stuff (po-faced satire of late capitalism, symbols that are meant to be deeply meaningful but are too often just kind of silly) and the post-9/11 'we should all be very unironic now because irony caused 9/11 but my characters don't seem to know this' stuff. The heroes of LF, if I can simplify wildly, are a housefrau dedicated only to her children, and a possibly schizophrenic academic. They each feel things deeply. They're each set apart from the upper-middle class fads and obsession with surfaces. The academic reads Wittgenstein, and not that easy late stuff, no, he reads the Tractatus, though this and his obsession with the Lightning Field show that he's also deeply flawed because he wants things to be perfectly ordered. The housefrau has a chance to help the academic, but doesn't, because she wants to care for her children.
Meanwhile, the two main characters drive to New York, then go back to LA very soon afterward.
So at some point someone can write a dissertation about the shift from postmodernism to whatever we're all reading now (a friend of mine calls one side of it the 'novel of detachment' in a recent Nation piece. Go Jon!), and as well as DFW, they can point to LF as a missing link. Sadly, I don't want to read these books, and I will not be re-reading this. (