Description:
Young Rebecca Roth moves west to star-spangled Los Angeles to obliterate the memory of her suicided mother. As soon as her feet have landed on Tinseltown ground, our protagonist--at turns sassy and self-denigrating--goes through hunky but unsuitable boyfriends, pregnancies, and humiliating assistant jobs like so much movie popcorn. L.A.'s odd and often unsavory characters are this book's stars: gap-toothed, underpaid actors; porn filmmakers; a goat named Flowers; and Giorgio the Italian, under whose pungent underarms Rebecca wants to hide from any whiff of her past. Though this schizophrenic first novel covers some interesting turf, it is by no means a smooth debut. Author Resnick shifts from first to second to third person and back in the turn of a page, frequently writes in half-sentences, and neatly describes but never seems to look very far beneath the surface of her eccentric characters. Perhaps such fits and starts are merely a by-product of depicting the over-stimulated, over-suntanned, and over-sensationalized City of Angels. In the end, L.A. remains a place where a night at a cocktail party for a friend of a friend of Madonna will always melt into "another bodacious orgiastic day in the California sun, where depression is outlawed (or heavily medicated) and sex is superficial, flagrant, and mondo delicto." --Maria Dolan
| 
