The Los Angeles Dana Spiotta evokes in her bold and strangely lyrical first
novel Lightning Field 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 fleeting 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.
"Los Angeles is the air we all breathe in this wonderfully funny,
accomplished, and far-reaching first novel about our consumer colossus and the
human products it makes and shapes." -- Don DeLillo
"A writer with an unerring ear for how people talk and try and cope
today." --
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Spiotta has a gift for evoking the way lucidity comes in flashes, like
something glimpsed at the edge of a movie frame, making us want to see more.
" -- The New Yorker
"The hippest, funniest, most urbane and heartfelt account of life west of
the 101 and north of the 10 to come along in years. Satiric but not cruel,
authentic but not maudlin." --
Thomas Curwen, The Los Angeles Times
"In this wonderful debut, Spiotta lays bare the modern consumer
society." --
Dylan Foley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Cooly blazing and beautiful first novel... She is a shockingly good
sentence writer; she's also a darkly hilarious writer." --
Heidi Julavits, American Book Review
"A wise and artful debut." -- Esquire
"A striking, original and very funny debut." -- Publisher’s Weekly
Author
Dana Spiotta's novels are available from Powell's
Books and Amazon.
© 2007 by Dana Spiotta, all rights reserved.