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Lightning Field: A Novel
 
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Lightning Field: A Novel (Paperback)

by Dana Spiotta (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 17.95
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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Spiotta's bitingly clever debut novel sports a rare book-jacket blurb from Don DeLillo, fitting since Spiotta mines the same postmodernist territory DeLillo put on the literary map, examining the detritus and dyspepsia of consumer culture. Mina, daughter of a once-respected movie director now dodging creditors from his retreat in a yurt in Ojai, Calif., has grown up steeped in Hollywood lore. Married to a screenwriter and conducting affairs with two unsuitable men, she finds herself taking clandestine shopping trips stocking up on shoes, scandalously expensive cashmere stockings and Ultra-Red lipstick and doing "the unthinkable, the violate," walking around the drivers' city of Los Angeles. Mina's compulsively elegant boss, Lorene, who runs a chain of high-concept theme restaurants (like a '40s serviceman's club "as imagined in fifties movies about wartime serviceman's clubs") staves off her own encroaching desperation with Tactile Hue Therapy, part of a guru-prescribed regimen of "Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification." She is a former "life-stylist," having made her fortune by teaching rich men how to be interesting. Mina and Lorene, adrift in anomie despite their expensive distractions, plan to escape L.A. on a cross-country road trip to find and "rescue" Michael, Mina's disturbed brother and Lorene's former lover, who has recently checked out of a mental hospital. Lorene and Mina never manage to meet up with Michael, appropriately enough in a novel documenting missed signals and crossed paths; Spiotta's characters are so hypertuned to cultural references that they fail to read each other. A striking, original and very funny debut. (Aug.)Forecast: Strong reviews, and plenty of them, will be required to pique readers' interest in this offbeat tale. The DeLillo blurb is key, and the cool-toned, sophisticated jacket art perfectly suggests the hypermodern goings-on within.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


Product Description

The Los Angeles Dana Spiotta evokes in her bold and strangely lyrical first novel is a land of Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles, a great centerless place where chains of reference get lost, or finally don't matter.

Mina lives with her screenwriter husband and works at her best friend Lorene's highly successful concept restaurants, which exploit the often unconscious desires and idiosyncrasies of a rich, chic clientele. Almost inadvertently, Mina has acquired two lovers. And then there are the other men in her life: her father, a washed-up Hollywood director living in a yurt and hiding from his debtors, and her disturbed brother, Michael, whose attempts to connect with her force Mina to consider that she might still have a heart -- if only she could remember where she had left it.

Between her Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification therapies and her elaborate devotion to style, Lorene is interested only in charting her own perfection and impending decay. Although supremely confident in a million shallow ways, she, too, starts to fray at the edges.

And there is Lisa, a loving mother who cleans houses, scrapes by, and dreams of food terrorists and child abductors, until even the most innocent events seem to hint at dark possibilities.

Lightning Field explores the language tics of our culture -- the consumerist fetishes, the self-obsession and the þeeting possibility that you just might have gotten it all badly wrong. In funny, cutting, unsentimental prose, Spiotta exposes the contradictions of contemporary lives in which "identity is a collection of references." She writes about overcoming not just despair but ambivalence.

Playful and dire, raw and poetic, Lightning Field introduces a startling new voice in American fiction.


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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews
5 star:
 (8)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:
 (2)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most helpful customer reviews

 
4.0 out of 5 stars Conceptually Morbid, Jul 13 2004
By Jaye Beldo "j" (florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
A first novel by a woman who grew up on the fringes of movie culture in California. Exquisite in its bitterness, humorous in the driest of martini ways, Dana offers us a conceptually morbid but witty view of Los Angeles on par with Bret Easton Ellis. Spiotta does not compromise her occasional poetic moments in her efforts to depict honestly/ironically the hollow and hapless souls she has cast in this quite worthwhile book.
The book does lack plot-but the character driven nature of it makes it worth delving into.

Jaye Beldo: Netnous@Aol.Com

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3.0 out of 5 stars Flashes of Brilliance, Mar 30 2003
By Stephanie Murg (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
With overtones of old Hollywood glamour and new Hollywood bulimia, the sky of Spiotta's debut novel is often illuminated with lightning sharp observations and thought-provoking dialogue, but the thunder of action and character development are eerily absent. The book keeps the reader at a distance, skipping too quickly among snapshots of the three female characters. The male characters are little more than names.

Lightning Field can be appreciated for its flashes of reflective brilliance, but in the end, Spiotta's scatterplot leaves the reader empty. In a book obsessed with film and set within its glossy capital, the story is ultimately celluloid and too obsessed with the close-up.

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5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ, Aug 25 2002
By A Customer
Life and reality are all relative in the city that never weeps. Los Angeles may lack a soul, but Spiotta gets to the heart of her characters, and she does so with biting humor, honesty, and
irony. Buy this book, it is GREAT reading!
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Most recent customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars tain-ment
a decent, quick read. yes, she has read "white noise" a few times.
two issues:
--the "this is how LA people are" bit got a tired; in a 220 page novel maybe a little less... Read more
Published on Feb 26 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars The Electricity of Lightning Captured
Every once in a while I read a book that leaves me changed. Lightning Field is one of those rare books that is so disturbingly refreshing I cannot help but be affected by it... Read more
Published on Nov 12 2001 by brad webb

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate Objective Correlative
Dana Spiotta's Lightning Field is an interesting first novel that initially seemed a little disjointed to me, but then I realized that the disjointedness is the whole point. Read more
Published on Sep 6 2001 by Elizabeth Hendry

5.0 out of 5 stars quote of the year: "Bang and banish"
Lightning Field is as nuanced and sublime a portrait of life and lifers in contemporary LA as can be found. Read more
Published on Aug 31 2001 by ghosthornet

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic debut novel
I found 'The Lightning Field' to be delightful. Dana Spiotta has truly burst onto the literary stage with all the wit of an Updike or Armistead Maupin, the pace and intricacy of a... Read more
Published on Aug 29 2001 by John McCaffrey

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed
Most uninteresting; in fact, it is the first book in a long time that I threw out--waste of money. I thought it would be a good read about L.A. Read more
Published on Aug 27 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars LA girl in fashion landscape and a pretty turn of phrase
Autobiographical, revealing, intimate, and touchingly confessional, like many first novels. Do we want to peek at the internal, frustrated and narcissistically driven lives of the... Read more
Published on Aug 7 2001 by Randall Neustaedter

5.0 out of 5 stars An Enlightening Gem
A slick, funny and sentient first novel about the waking dream that is Los Angeles and three women's respective pursuits for meaning within its lonely and distorted Hollywood hall... Read more
Published on Aug 7 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars Identity as a collection of references
This book makes me wonder why Dana Spiotta didn't start writing books sooner. Lightning Field establishes its identity as a novel through a collection of references, much as the... Read more
Published on Jul 31 2001 by Scott A. Supak

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