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Title: Layover by Lisa Zeidner ISBN: 0-06-095649-6 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 16 May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.91 (65 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful surprise
Comment: "Layover" has one of those covers that made me pick up the book and read the jacket every time I saw it, but for whatever reason, I didn't actually purchase it until recently. I'm not sure what I expected--something funny, sexy and light, I suppose.
The book is that and so much more. Zeidner writes deftly about the most taboo of subjects: loss of a child, adultery, anonymous sex, grief, mental illness. Her prose is at once hilarious and tragic, flippant and profound.
It's both telling and a wonderfully employed device that the reader only meets Claire's philandering husband in flashbacks and phone conversations, and that the true age of her dead son is obscured by her own lies and fantasies.
I couldn't put this book down; in fact, I found myself racing to its satisfying and poignant ending. It's a shame that Zeidner's other novels appear to be unavailable--if they're one whit as good as this one, I want to read them all! I'll comfort myself instead with the hope that she's working on a new one.
Rating: 5
Summary: Sex as an Rx for cynicism
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: An Awesome novel!
Comment: 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!
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Title: The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey ISBN: 0060094850 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke ISBN: 0802136648 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Swimming Sweet Arrow : A Novel by Maureen Gibbon ISBN: 0316355569 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 08 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Have You Seen Me? by Laura Denham ISBN: 0786710624 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Downers Grove by Michael Hornburg ISBN: 0802137938 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 09 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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