Nom de Plume

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.