Lightning Field

The Los Angeles Dana Spiotta evokes in her bold and strangely lyrical first novel 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.

Three lives entwine in Los Angeles, a centerless land of Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles. Ambivalent Mina, married to a screenwriter, works at her friend Lorene's concept restaurants. Once supremely confident, Lorene is starting to fray at the edges.

Publishers Weekly

Spiotta's bitingly clever debut novel sports a rare book-jacket blurb from Don DeLillo, fitting since Spiotta mines the same postmodernist territory DeLillo put on the literary map, examining the detritus and dyspepsia of consumer culture. Mina, daughter of a once-respected movie director now dodging creditors from his retreat in a yurt in Ojai, Calif., has grown up steeped in Hollywood lore. Married to a screenwriter and conducting affairs with two unsuitable men, she finds herself taking clandestine shopping trips stocking up on shoes, scandalously expensive cashmere stockings and Ultra-Red lipstick and doing "the unthinkable, the violate," walking around the drivers' city of Los Angeles. Mina's compulsively elegant boss, Lorene, who runs a chain of high-concept theme restaurants (like a '40s serviceman's club "as imagined in fifties movies about wartime serviceman's clubs") staves off her own encroaching desperation with Tactile Hue Therapy, part of a guru-prescribed regimen of "Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification." She is a former "life-stylist," having made her fortune by teaching rich men how to be interesting. Mina and Lorene, adrift in anomie despite their expensive distractions, plan to escape L.A. on a cross-country road trip to find and "rescue" Michael, Mina's disturbed brother and Lorene's former lover, who has recently checked out of a mental hospital. Lorene and Mina never manage to meet up with Michael, appropriately enough in a novel documenting missed signals and crossed paths; Spiotta's characters are so hypertuned to cultural references that they fail to read each other. A striking, original and very funny debut. (Aug.) Forecast: Strong reviews, and plenty ofthem, will be required to pique readers' interest in this offbeat tale. The DeLillo blurb is key, and the cool-toned, sophisticated jacket art perfectly suggests the hypermodern goings-on within. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Dana Spiotta, whom Michiko Kakutani called "wonderfully observant and wonderfully gifted... with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadness of contemporary life" (The New York Times), earned a 2006 National Book Award nomination for Eat the Document -- a bold novel about a fugitive radical from the 1970s who has lived in hiding for twenty-five years.