I picked this up because we were going to spend a few days in LA (I love reading books that are connected to the places I travel to), and read it on the plane with great pleasure. The voice won me over immediately, from the fantastic opening line — “One summer morning while I was still a virgin though my virginity was on its last legs, I woke up and didn’t want to go to New Jersey.” It’s droll and witty and smart-mouthed and wonderful. The novel deserves a spot in the canon of coming-of-age narratives of lusty lady adventurers — though, like all the great ones do, it completely upends the expectations of the genre, most interestingly, in the way it plays with time, rocketing suddenly years ahead and then back again, but of course also in relation to the marriage plot.
There’s a kind of narrative doubling that I only really realized later — the life of Aunt Lola, who makes possible the narrator’s stay in LA during that initial summer, runs counter to that of our central protagonist (whose name is Sophie) as an alternate possibility, one that is counter-cultural in a different sort of way. Then again, the only stable married couple, Sophie’s parents, are also on their second marriage (and are also not really around). There are various moments of romantic longing throughout the novel, and the way that they are inevitably followed by disappointment, but not disillusion, is what most powerfully suggests their idealized nature.
The real love at the heart of the text, we might say, is a love for LA, and what it represents — also, of course, an ideal, but a city is more capacious a vehicle for dreams than a mere person…
Kasia Reads 