Nom de Plume

Ultimately, the question is not who, but what Bill Napoli is.

The ingenious ladies over at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels have come up with the idea of Google bombing him. This is my contribution — now make yours.

For those of you who live under a rock (which, admittedly, is me most of the time), Bill Napoli is the republican senator from North Dakota responsible for recently passed legislation that prevents doctors from performing an abortion except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. And this is his description of what would be an acceptable case for abortion.

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Is it just me, or has he spent a lot of time fantasizing about that particular scenario? I mean, what does the brutal sodomy have to do with anything?

Thanks Wade!

When Steve was in L.A., and we were doing the long-distance thing (2 years of it!), I came to the conclusion that I really detested the city. Everything about it seems false: the people, the architecture, the stores, everything. Even the balmy weather and crisp light conspire to render the place completely unreal. Spiotta evokes this sense of L.A. in her novel Lightning Field: her characters are victims of geography as much as they are of circumstance.

Mina doesn’t have any good male figures in her life: her father is a ex-Hollywood director living in a yurt and avoiding his debtors; her brother is disturbed, having spent most of his adult life in and out of psychiatric wards. Even her screenwriter husband is somehow completely ineffectual. As a result, she has acquired two lovers, one of whom is her husband’s best friend and who spends most of his time videotaping their time together.

Mina works at her friend Lorene’s concept restaurants, places that cater to the whims of Los Angelites while simultaneously mocking them. Vanity and Vexation, for instance, is an “eccentric-diet-tolerant eating environment, a gourmet restaurant that would adapt to virtually any dietary restriction.” Lorene herself spends most of her time not eating, visiting spas for spiritual detoxification, and coming up with new ways to pander to Hollywood’s elite. It turns out that Lorene was initially Mina’s brother’s girlfriend, which is how the two met — and neither is immune to the consequences of his illness.

On the periphery is Lisa, who cleans Lorene’s house and dreams about the myriad ways her children could be harmed until she becomes so neurotic that everything poses a threat.

The story itself is completely disjointed and its themes are, when it comes right down to it, rather banal — but somehow, it just works. Spiotta captures the lives of her characters, who seem to vacillate between what is real (family problems, doomed relationships) and what is not (boob jobs, movies, L.A. itself). The result is a dark disturbing novel that is punctuated with irony and wit.