Layover

Rating:
Summary: Promiscuous=Insane?
Review: After loosing her only child and finding out that her husband has been unfaithful, Claire checks out on life and checks into annonymous hotel rooms looking for love in all the wrong places. It becomes obvious that this women has deep seeded mental problems. In the end I don't know if her husband actually came for her or if she imaged it. She does not find happiness in the end - this women goes off the deep end! I hardly consider returning to a non-loving cheating husband qualifies as "redemption"! Come on!

This book reveals some profound ideas: like reading the newspaper marriage announcements to find the fault lines and statements like: "Comfort and danger: so hard to get the balances right. Because it's not as if I knew my husband. Rather I knew him so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together-they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn. Our years together were age, age itself and indignation." Unfortunately not enough to save this book or the woman this book refers to as the heroine. If she's a heroine - the bravest superwomen the decade has produced we are in sorry shape as a society!

Rating:
Summary: Promiscuous=Insane?
Review: After loosing her only child and finding out that her husband has been unfaithful, Claire checks out on life and checks into anonymous hotel rooms looking for love in all the wrong places. It becomes obvious that this woman has deep seeded mental problems. In the end I don't know if her husband actually came for her or if she imaged it. She does not find happiness in the end - this woman goes off the deep end! I hardly consider returning to a non-loving cheating husband qualifies as "redemption"! Come on!

This book reveals some profound ideas: like reading the newspaper marriage announcements to find the fault lines and statements like: "Comfort and danger: so hard to get the balances right. Because it's not as if I knew my husband. Rather I knew him so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together-they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn. Our years together were age, age itself and indignation." Unfortunately not enough to save this book or the woman this book refers to as the heroine. If she's a heroine - the bravest superwomen the decade has produced we are in sorry shape as a society!

Rating:
Summary: I raced to the end of this book
Review: I didn't know what to expect from this book after listening to friends talk about it, reading reviews, and the jacket copy. But as soon as I started reading, I was hooked. I found the woman's reactions believable; people's reactions to grief come in many forms, and this dissociated response is but one of many.
In creating a protagonist who was just barely on the sane side of a total breakdown, the author made it possible to stay within her main character's point of view throughout the writing. I found that compelling.
The shift in tone from jaunty, sexy, and hilariously funny to the many lyrically beautiful passages (especially at the end, in the park) didn't bother me. Her flip, sassy, seemingly shallow responses wereclearly defensive. Her deep, gut-level, poignant grief was painful to share. Both felt exactly right.
This Zeidner lady can really write. I don't read poetry, but having finished Layover, I just might check out her poems, too.

Rating:
Summary: Sex as an Rx for cynicism
Review: Lisa Zeidner's "Layover" is lean and more than a little mean, largely because it's from the point of view of Zeidner's first-person protagonist, Claire Newbold, whose only child was killed in a car accident some time before the story begins. It's about battling the urge to escape from grief into cynicism, but don't be put off. Zeidner has a light touch and a sharp sense of humor, and she'ss anything but maudlin.

Claire is middle-aged, a traveling saleswoman of high-tech medical supplies. Early in the novel she begins a hotel-hopping journey of self-discovery that jeopardizes her job, marriage and sanity. What sets her off is a confession by her surgeon husband that he has had an affair with a woman colleague, and what helps bring her back from the brink are sexual encounters with an 18-year-old boy and then with the boy's father. Zeidner manages to make both encounters believable.

There's good dialogue and sharply amusing observations about American life at the end of the 20th century, but the biggest surprise is the skill with which Zeidner writes about sex. "Layover" is playfully and insightfully erotic, a quality most American writers can't seem to imagine, let alone capture on the page.

I didn't quite like Claire - she's smug and intolerant of human frailties, a vagabond with a big bank account - but I believed her grief and admired the way Zeidner handled her struggle to overcome the sense that she and everyone else are doomed to suffer in solitude. Claire wants to return to normal life but is plagued by the feeling that she knew her husband "so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together - they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn."

"Layover" is funny and sad, smart and brave. Read it if you like fiction that explores what it means to be human.

Rating:
Summary: Sex as an Rx for cynicism
Review: Lisa Zeidner's "Layover" is lean and more than a little mean, largely because it's from the point of view of Zeidner's first-person protagonist, Claire Newbold, whose only child was killed in a car accident some time before the story begins. It's about battling the urge to escape from grief into cynicism, but don't be put off. Zeidner has a light touch and a sharp sense of humor, and she'ss anything but maudlin.

Claire is middle-aged, a traveling saleswoman of high-tech medical supplies. Early in the novel she begins a hotel-hopping journey of self-discovery that jeopardizes her job, marriage and sanity. What sets her off is a confession by her surgeon husband that he has had an affair with a woman colleague, and what helps bring her back from the brink are sexual encounters with an 18-year-old boy and then with the boy's father. Zeidner manages to make both encounters believable.

There's good dialogue and sharply amusing observations about American life at the end of the 20th century, but the biggest surprise is the skill with which Zeidner writes about sex. "Layover" is playfully and insightfully erotic, a quality most American writers can't seem to imagine, let alone capture on the page.

I didn't quite like Claire - she's smug and intolerant of human frailties, a vagabond with a big bank account - but I believed her grief and admired the way Zeidner handled her struggle to overcome the sense that she and everyone else are doomed to suffer in solitude. Claire wants to return to normal life but is plagued by the feeling that she knew her husband "so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together - they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn."

"Layover" is funny and sad, smart and brave. Read it if you like fiction that explores what it means to be human.

Rating:
Summary: The kindness of strangers
Review: People express grief in different ways. Years ago, a colleague was hauled out of her classroom and told that her husband (in his 50s with no history of heart problems) had had a heart attack. He died before she could get to the hospital. She returned to work the very next day and picked up her classes as though nothing had happened. She was widely criticized for her apparent lack of grief. Much later, she told me that work was the only thing that kept her sane--it was the one thing got her up in the morning, dressed, and on the road. And so her routine kept going.

"Layover" is the story of a grieving woman--41 year-old Claire Newbold--whose young child, Evan, recently died. Claire is a travelling saleswoman, married to a surgeon who admonishes her that "she needs to feel connected," and then confesses to an affair at the worst possible moment. Reeling from the knowledge of her husband's affair while still in the grief process, Claire undergoes a breakdown. She steps out of her life one day, and soon finds that it is not easy to return--even if she wants to.

Once outside of her life, Claire discovers that she can pretend to be anything she wants, and she begins to engage in odd behaviour. Using her knowledge of hotels, she begins a odyssey of self-discovery that includes sexual encounters with strangers, memories of her lost son, and a one-sided conversation with "the other woman."

I really enjoyed this book. It was original, and despite the subject matter, it was not a depressing read. Some readers may be offended by the sexual content. To me, the book simply reiterated the fact that you never know what hell the person standing right in front of you may be going through. This book was thought provoking. I recommend it, and I will look for other books by Zeidner in the future.

Rating:
Summary: An Awesome novel!
Review: This book was not what I expected it to be, necessarily. It wasn't one of those books to be read in a single sitting, but the story really drew me in. I thought that the character development was brilliant, as least as far as Claire was concerned. I genuinely wanted to know what was going on in her mind and what was going to happen to her next. This book is very insightful, and written very cleverly. I know that I won't hesitate to read other works by Zeidner.

Rating:
Summary: An Awesome novel!
Review: While you can't judge a book by it's cover you apparently can sell one that way. I was intrigued by the photograph on the cover of this paperback- up close and in focus a black industrial style telephone-off the hook. In the background a female nude-pensive and unfocused. It appealed to all of the restlessness I felt. Midlife-disconnected and not quite focused.

The book rocks! Descriptions were apt-even startling! The author, Lisa Zeidner, has great deftness at drawing clear word pictures that give both visual clues and emotive insight into her characters. The starkness of the setting helped somewhat offset the maudlin tendencies of a story told in first person by a person who is somewhat deranged. This book is awesome -- highly recommended! Another recent fav: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez. As I like saying to my boyfriend: SHUT UP AND READ!