Layover: : A Novel

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: If you don't laugh you'll cry, but bet on fits of both.
Review: Lisa Zeidner's LAYOVER is the kind of book you read straight through, hardly stopping to feed yourself or make a trip to the bathroom--it's that good, that engrossing. Zeidner's sparse, beautifully crafted prose is right on the money--the work of an accomplished storyteller and, if this novel is any indication, a closet comedienne. (Let's face it, there simply aren't many writers around who can make you cringe and guffaw in the same breath.) I suspect that Claire Newbold, the novel's grieving, unstable protagonist, will be heralded as the prototypical character for the next century, and as such, she's worth listening to. Kudos to Lisa Zeidner for creating a truly sympathetic character whose behavior we, as readers, may also see fit to condemn (even as Claire runs red light after red light, there we are, slouched in the front seat, glad to be along for the ride). Like the book itself, Claire is smart, funny, and brutally honest. LAYOVER is long overdue.