Lightning Field Book

How Superb is Thy Blurb!

Don DeLillo blurbed Dana Spiotta's debut:

"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."

And here's Bret Easton Ellis (whom Spiotta has in turn described as a "fascinating and sly writer"):

"A truly convincing L.A. novel: the scraped nerves, the free-floating dissatisfaction, the lingering scenes in chic, empty restaurants and hotel bars, the conversations with the tense inflections that don't reveal anything, the nowhere sex with wandering, absent lovers, a place where everything's a reference to a movie and the pull of wanting to be someone you're not is inescapable - and finally the half-hearted escape and the inevitable return. Dana Spiotta's focus and control and insight are remarkable; this raw, skillful book, revelatory."

Finally here's how Spiotta spruiks her own book, albeit a little alliteratively, in an interview:

"Lightning Field is about the language of consumerism. It is about Los Angeles and alienation. Adultery and loneliness. It is a very funny book."



White Lightning, White Heat, White Noise

Spiotta writes deftly, but it's hard to tell whether she empathises with her "human products", these victims of rampant Los Angelation, and whether we're supposed to, too.

Are they characters to admire or objects of satire? Should we empathise with their predicament or let them slip past into literary oblivion in a "controlled moment of self-regard"?

Which begs the question whether, like one of her characters giving money to vagrants, Spiotta grants them a leading role "not out of sympathy for their suffering, not even out of pity, but as a talisman against them [i.e., against their suffering and pity]."

My plight resembles the way that some readers find it hard to tell whether DeLillo was writing badly or taking the piss in "White Noise".

Whole slabs of description and dialogue sound like they derive from a textbook on Phenomenological Post-Modernism. Did (non-academic) people really talk like this in 2001? Do they still? Is Spiotta immersed in this culture or averse to it?

What are we to think of a novel that can only be regarded as funny, if and when you reach the conclusion that it's ironic (after which you can laugh retroactively)?

The novel's Post-Post-Modern Realism seems to work against drawing this conclusion too readily. Hence, it forces you to suspend judgment, possibly for too long, before laughing. Or, having laughed, a sense of guilt persists.

A blurb for her second novel seems to define the horns of the dilemma:

"Spiotta has a wonderful ironic sensibility, juxtaposing '70s fervor with '90s expediency."

It's hard to work out whether Spiotta's fervor prevails over her expediency. I want to believe in her, but I'm still equivocating. If I could have got my head around these issues, I would have rated the novel four stars.

In terms of analogy, think of the full-bodied, intense and vigorous whine of a more up-market but self-consciously hipster version of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" (published the same year), rounded off by the stylish lingering aftertaste of J.G. Ballard and "White Noise" itself.

Regardless of concerns about authorial intention, the bobo characters are clinically well-drawn, the narrative is neatly dissembled and re-assembled. There is clearly a substantive and substantial talent at work here. Besides, if DeLillo likes it, she gets to have her cake and eat it too.

Maybe this assemblage of Spiotta's writing will give you a taste of and for the cake.


"I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit."
[Ecclesiastes 1:14]




MICHAEL

When she was without money, before she had the restaurant, Lorene had only her beauty, her taste, and her style to recommend her.

MINA

She had a laser accuracy for reading other people's desires and vanities...

MICHAEL

...and she could help them actualise those desires as styles and traits and purchasable objects in the world...

MINA

It's a pity Lorene had to quit consulting, end her career as a life-stylist...

MICHAEL

It was inevitable though. She'd finally become so stark and minimalist, so desperate for simplicity and purity, that if she continued she'd need a stylist herself...

MINA

She was obsessed but detached at the same time...

MICHAEL

She was abstracting herself...to a kind of philosophical autism. It's like falling off a cliff, and then you're stuck in a labyrinth of solipsism.

MINA

Still, she drew on six decades of fashion mistakes all juxtaposed, recontextualised, 'deconstructed' by people who really believed fashion was the heart of subversion.

MICHAEL

Fashion is a form of daydreaming.

MINA

I prefer movies.

MICHAEL

You look more like a person in a movie than any person I've ever met.

MINA

I have so many reference points in my head, as many as the memories of my own life.

MICHAEL

Movies?

MINA

Yes… they've become nearly equally weighted, the memories of my actual life and the memories of the movies I've seen…

MICHAEL

Is there finally that much difference?

MINA

I sometimes think that if someone saw all the movies I've seen, the number of times I've seen them and in the order I've seen them, that person might know exactly who I am...

MICHAEL

That couldn't really be true...

MINA

...but if it was half true, it'd be like my identity was like a collection of references.

MICHAEL

So what occupies you, if not some performance of yourself?

MINA

I've just begun to locate my need to be filmed - is it perhaps a particularly female perception...that women are in a way programmed to be animated by the attention of others?...It's as if I am actually being watched...

MICHAEL

Wouldn't being filmed unhinge your desire, the alchemy of what you are?

MINA

It makes me feel as if I'm somewhere else, some world of bodies and touch, of thought-effacing pleasure.

MICHAEL

It actually has to be pleasurable as well as high-concept. Not just abstract pontificating about the nature of the camera's gaze!

MINA

I desire to be extraordinary in some way.

MICHAEL

You think you can achieve it through sex?

MINA

The cold reality of sex, the way it makes you bodied and exposed to someone not you, my God, the reveling in the body, the hushed words that fly, the desperate feelings...

MICHAEL

...the whispered affections for different body parts...

MINA

There are so many alternative fictions at work in my life right now...secrets, lies, fictions...

MICHAEL

Everyone has secrets.

MINA

The discretion of female sexuality, its secret demureness, its endless interiority - yes, it is secret - solitary and contained at all times.

MICHAEL

It's not necessarily something I want to be cured of - desire.

MINA

I saw this boy today. No more than 18. His gaze travelled right past me. He was completely indifferent to me.

MICHAEL

No look back?

MINA

He gave me no look back!

MICHAEL

I can't believe it.

MINA

I am only thirty-two, and I am invisible to this guy.

MICHAEL

I can't bear to think of you in the throes of ennui…

MINA

...and then I saw the rest of my life stretched out before me. In a flash. The slow, excruciating dismantling of me as an object of desire.

MICHAEL

No!

MINA

I would no longer command desire. And I felt so upset by this future...

MICHAEL

Maybe it was just the quality of the difference between you, beyond age or gender or geography, but a categorical difference, an absolute, italic difference all the same.

MINA

I want somebody to touch me with reverent slowness.

MICHAEL

A massage...a California come-on...

MINA

For just one time, I want to feel electric and possible.

MICHAEL

Yes!

MINA

Why can't I get what I desire?

MICHAEL

Don't look at me, sister!

MINA

Well, I'm from fucking California and I want a goddamn answer!


SOUNDTRACK:

The Cure - "Hot Hot Hot!!!"



Graham Parker- "The Kid With The Butterfly Net"
[From the album "Struck by Lightning"]