“There is the need for the interdisciplinary reading of bodies with students, for breaking away from dichotomies, ruptures that are enviable and deforming.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (AUG 3, 2011)

In this artful, cerebral novel spanning four decades and encompassing the tribal conventions and counterculture movements of the 70’s and 80’s, the reader is plunged into a cunning world of philosophy and hedonism that is best described as baroque rawness or stark-naked grandiloquence. If these terms appear to be incompatible pairings, the reader will grasp the seeming polarity as axiomatic soon after feasting on Edie Meidav’s complex narrative style. A carnal vapor infuses every provocative page of this unorthodox psychological crime thriller.

Contrary to the suggestive cover, title, and product description, this will not appeal to fans of chick lit or genre suspense thrillers. This is more in tune with Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, with a peppering of TC Boyle and Dan Chaon. Muscular, sweat-producing, and erudite, the satisfaction of reading these pages rests on the reader’s consent to capitulate control of predetermined ideas and conceptions and enter into a contract with the author, giving Meidav permission and authority to rule the aesthetic jurisdiction, and to accede to the flow, command, and demand of its prose.

The eponymous title refers to Lana Mahler and her best friend, Rose, who meet as teenagers and form a bond that graduates from symbiotic to alpha/supplicant (Lana as alpha). They call themselves Lola One and Lola Two. Lana’s parents are both esteemed academics; her father, Vic, is a neuroscientist cum philosopher of the counterculture variety, and has his own willing supplicants known as “shaggies.”

Lana’s mother is an ethnologist/feminist who has garnered popular fame. As noted, the novel takes place primarily in California, with an emphasis on the analysis of California lifestyles and attitudes, particularly the free-thinking Berkeley. Lana and Rose parted ways many years ago, but the psychodynamics of their early relationship continues to haunt both of them.

The book opens in 2008 in the Alcatraz penitentiary. Vic Mahler is on death row, with an execution date less than two weeks away. The author takes us into Mahler’s mind, which gravitates from hearty to hallucinogenic. We learn that he hasn’t seen his daughter in twenty years, but that Rose has been writing him letters and offering her assistance as an attorney. Juxtaposed with the prison opening, the story takes us to Lana, who is on her way to a desert spa with her latest boyfriend and her twin boys, a place right out of Boyle‘s The Road to Wellville. Rosa is on the verge of tracing Lana down after a twenty-year separation.

The disclosure of Vic’s crime and fate, as well as the unveiling of the Mahler family and Rose, is gradually revealed by positioning each character in alternating chapters. They examine their lives, past and present, and dissect each other, so that the reader is shown each character through various lenses that eventually coalesce into a prism of overlapping and juxtaposed realities.

Like Chaon’s Await Your Reply, the narrative unfolds with an intricate opacity toward transparency. Meidav has a knack for shocking the reader at intervals, like the best thrillers do. Just as the Lolas once worked as strip-tease dancers together, the author unveils surprises in increments like a strip-tease act for the reader.

Lana and Rose are the locus of the novel, and the narrative forms a mosaic or tapestry of several dialogues and narratives between them and their relationship with the external world, much like Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children is a tapestry of texts and collage of languages that form a unity of what is virtual and what is real. There is a constant flux between the Lolas, and a tension between what is true and what is illusive, what is implied and what is extant.

It took me about one hundred pages to relax into Meidav’s style, the wrap-around sentences and esoterica of neuroscience and philosophy, the limbic arousal and dourness of Martin Amis.

“…people’s faces work to hold up new veils by the minute: the all-time favorite is dignity, as is the visage of sex-transcending enlightenment, a new kind of spiritual chastity armature.”

Meidav’s bare-bones plot–a crime, a perpetrator, and a fate–are less important than the characters that inhabit this dystopia of false and renegade idols. Nature, the pliable state of consciousness, and the desire to reclaim the credo of youth and supple confidence, is the plaintive hope and recursive doctrine. We are all disciples of the mind; we are prisoners of our bodies.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Edie Meidav
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon No One Tells Everything by Rae Meadows The Legacy by Kirstin Tranter

Bibliography:

• The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (2001)
• Crawl Space (2005)
• Lola, California (July 2011)

“I think I had to get this old to understand some things I really needed to know. I needed to suffer some humiliation and to pick up a few battle scars. It’s made me less shallow, and for more appreciative of everything…. Getting older is hard, you lose an awful lot. But I don’t know, I think it’s worth the trade.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAY 22, 2010)

Why would anyone want to attend their fortieth high school reunion? We find out in Elizabeth Berg’s bittersweet novel, The Last Time I Saw You. The author introduces us to a diverse group of people in their late fifties who still remember what it was like to be an adolescent at Whitley High.

Fifty-eight year old Dorothy Shauman is divorced and desperate to reconnect with the best-looking guy in the class, Pete Decker, “the football player, the prom king.” As Dorothy gazes at herself in the mirror, she “raises her chin so her turkey neck disappears.” Her imagination runs wild as she predicts how she and Pete will banter, flirt, and subsequently leave the others behind to spend some quality time alone. Mary Alice Mayhew had been shunned by her high-school classmates because of her dowdiness and lack of social skills. Although she has never been married, she claims to be content with her quiet and solitary existence. “She has learned not to let hurt take up residence inside her.” However, there will be someone at the reunion whom she has thought about and would like to see.

Widower and loner Lester Hessenpfeffer is devoted to the animals he cares for in his veterinary practice, and would rather not attend the reunion at all; however, his assistant, Jeanine, hounds him into going. Pete Decker left his wife, Nora, for a younger woman, and now regrets his rash behavior; his mistress is vapid and his wife has started dating someone else. He hopes to win her back at the get-together. Candy Sullivan, the most desirable female in the class, is miserable in her marriage to an aloof and controlling husband. She needs to get away from him while she makes some tough decisions about her future.

Berg has a field day with her lively and diverse cast, all of whom still have a great deal to learn about life. As the former classmates ponder who they were forty years earlier and how they have changed, they are forced to admit that some of their choices may have been misguided. They wonder if it is too late to seek the happiness that has eluded them. Can a loner find companionship at an age when most people are thinking of retirement? Is it possible for an unhappily married woman to start over, either alone or with someone else?

In the wrong hands, this could easily have been a maudlin, predictable, and heavy-handed work of fiction. Fortunately, Berg hits all the right notes in this crisp, succinct, sometimes profound, and often hilarious novel. She explores her characters’ confusion, insecurities, and fears with compassion, subtlety, and wry humor. As people age, they may develop wrinkles, gain a few pounds, and become a bit more set in their ways. However, most people never lose the desire for love, acceptance, and fulfillment. The Last Time I Saw You is touching but never saccharine. To her credit, Berg does not resort to a clichéd resolution for each character’s problems. Instead, she wraps everything up satisfyingly and intelligently, showing respect for us and for the stalwart men and women who dare to display their vulnerabilities. As one woman says at a truth-telling session in which everyone bares his soul: “I’ve finally gained some perspective that lets me laugh about things that used to make me want to tear my hair out.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 757 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elizabeth Berg
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another reunion:  A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve And another woman facing middle age: The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Bibliography:

• Durable Goods (1993)
• Talk Before Sleep (1994)
• Range of Motion (1995)
• The Pull of the Moon (1996)
• Joy School (1997)
• What We Keep (1998)
• Until the Real Thing Comes Along (1999)
• Open House (2000)
• Ordinary Life: Stories (2001)
• Never Change (2001)
• True to Form (2002)
• Say When (2003)
• The Art of Mending (2004)
• The Year of Pleasures (2005)
• The Handmaid and the Carpenter (2006)
• We Are All Welcome Here (2006)
• Dream When You’re Feeling Blue (2007)
• The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation (April 2008)
• Home Safe (Aril 2009)
• The Last Time I Saw You (April 2010)
• Once Upon a Time, There Was You (April 2011)

Non-fiction:

• Family Traditions (1992)
• Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True (2000)