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Selected Reviews of Layover_________________________________
New York Tmes, June 6, 1999 Seattle Times, July 11, 1999 Le Monde August 24, 2000
_____________________________________________________ Scroll down for reviews in Newsweek , The Washington Post , The Chicago Tribune and New York Newsday.
Newsweek A novel about sex, grief and free hotel rooms THE RESTAURANT IS LOVELY–THE sort of swishy place where the waiter recites the specials as if they were "an epic poem." The company, however, needs work. Early in Lisa Zeidner's scabrous, indelible novel Layover, Claire Newbold, 41, meets a college freshman named Zach at a Four Seasons swimming pool in Philadelphia. She seduces him before their bathing suits are dry, then invites herself to dinner with him and his mom. Mom turns out to be a real sad sack. Clearly never got over her divorce. Desperate for reassurance, etc., Claire is disgusted and lets loose on the woman, exhorting her, in an astonishing torrent, to get her act together. "Talking so much is one thing– Christ, read Cosmo," she says. "But the neediness! It's stultifying! " Mom is devastated. Each seems amused, but later he tells Claire, "You, anyhow, no offense, do not seem like any Michael Jordan of Mental Health, to go lecturing someone else on their game." Point taken. Claire is a traveling saleswoman whose son died a few years back and who has suddenly found she can't stand the thought of going home again. Layover follows Claire for weeks as she sneaks and cons her way into hotel rooms around the country and spends the night for free, stripping away her identity, ranting, Iying, pretending to be a cardiothoracic surgeon, dodging her apoplectic husband who is a cardiothoracic surgeon and doing whatever she can to exorcise her grief. Early on, you read Layover as if it's a thriller. You want to know how Claire snags those hotel rooms, and you're on edge for the moment she gets caught. (In her acknowledgments, Zeidner thanks "members of the Security staffs at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia and the Westin William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, who have asked to remain anonymous.") But Layover gradually metamorphoses into a much deeper sort of novel about marriage, pain and the fantasy of flight. Zeidner's book– particularly the way Claire wisecracks in the face of fear – calls to mind Lorrie Moore's stunning story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," though it's hard to imagine Moore writing so graphically about the return messy, unmade beds that are sex and love. The novel's also reminiscent of John Updike in its pitiless assessment of everyone's defenses and delusions. Ultimately, though, Zeidner is an affirmative writer who makes you care about Claire even as she careers out of control. Our heroine is so manic for so much of the novel that you know she'll eventually have to come down. Every step of the way, you wish her nothing but a safe landing. ______________________________________________ The Washington Post Fiction: Loving and Leaving Layover By Lisa Zeidner / Random House. 268 pp. $24 Think of all the meanings implicit in "1ayover": an overnight respite during a journey, sex during same, an end to that sex. Zeidner plumbs all those connotations in this zesty, funny and sweetly touching account of a traveling saleswoman on the lam. As a poet – her collection Pocket Sundial won the Brittingham Prize – Zeidner is obviously used to havng her words do double (and triple) duty; but even allowing for poetic license, narrator Claire Newbold's name is a little top-heavy with portent. However that's a minor wrinkle in an otherwise sleek and smoothly flowing narrative. Claire, who is 41, didn't start out intending to be homeless, she confesses. But when she falls asleep after swimming too long in a hotel pool and misses a flight to her next sales call, she discovers that she can stay in hotels without paying and – even more important – without anyone knowing where she is. The trick, which she refines over the course of a month, is to go to a hotel where she regularly stays on her rounds selling "medical equipment so dull, ugly, and without personality that anyone would feel a chasm of churning emptiness open beneath them to have to deal with it on a daily basis." She swims in the pool without checking in and, still wet, gains access to an unoccupied room by using a chambermaid as an unwitting ally. To this gentle reader's regret, even fictively this scam works only in motels in second-tier burgs, for when Claire tries to sneak into the Philadelphia Four Seasons, she's tripped up by its high-tech security system and her credit card having been reported as stolen by her seemingly vengeful husband, Kenneth, a cardiothoracic surgeon– she has to pony up real cash to get a room. There is something seductive and exciting about slipping through the cracks of the tightIy scheduled workaday world, especially for women, who are supposed to be rule abiding, accessible and accounted for every hour of the day. But Claire is doing more than just avoiding the automated reminders of quotidian life: faxes, e-mail, voice mail She's running away from the unbearable pain of losing her small son in an auto accident, her inability to conceive again and Kenneth's one-time affair. Like so many of us, she begins with the delusion of her own invincibility but in the end comes to acknowledge her fragility and need to be connected to husband, family and the greater world. Along the way – and certainly not in revenge against Kenneth, she insists – has has a quick tumble at the Four Seasons with a teenager named Zachary and offers herself as "a present" to his lawyer father. She also checks out publications by the Other Woman's poet-husband which enables Zeidner to work in some deliciously clumsy poetry and wicked jabs at "Earth Mothery American poetesses and the bearded bearish Irish poets [who] deserved each other." Cardiothoracic surgeons are "pretty distasteful" too: Most of them are hunched over, balding guys, of below~average height, in unflattering glasses. But Zeidner also includes passages of maternal grief and longing so poignant they make one's throat ache. Bella Stander is a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly magazine. www.bellastander.com ______________________________ The Chicago Tribune Dear Departed Reviewed by By Joanne Kaufman Layover By Lisa Zeidner / Random House, 268 pages, $24 It was not premeditated, certainly not a conscious thing, Claire Newbold's decision to run away from home for a while, to run away from her life. It's just that it was so unexpectedly easy to lean on the impersonal hospitality of hotels in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh; it's just that home was where the hurt was. A medical equipment saleswoman, Claire had been trying to cope with the death of her 4-year-old son, Evan ("(It) had happened on a not-too-busy street less than five miles away, when a housewife– not drunk, not even speeding–had turned right on red legally and went into a skid in a light rain."). Claire also was trying to cope with the recently acquired knowledge that her surgeon husband, Ken, had not kept up his end of the wedding vows. While the timing of Ken's confession left something to be desired–he spilled the beans in a post-coital, post-orgasmic spasm of guilt– Claire figured she really should have known something was up. After all, Ken had just bought her an espresso machine. He "tended to spend money at emotional junctions. His purchases were often smoke signals. This is not unusual, I suppose. Women get new haircuts; men buy small electronics. Cars and major appliances spell big trouble." Even if Ken's indiscretion is one more blow to a heart that has been hard hit already, Claire understands, well, sort of understands, what's behind it. "(M)y impression was that he'd known the woman from his undergraduate days, and that their lighthearted reunion seemed like a promising way to suture past and future, chop out the unpleasant present. I understood that he never intended to bypass me. He just hoped to thrust his way past the accident's impact, the twisted tin." In a turn of events that recalls Ann Tyler's Ladder of Years and Kathryn Harrison's Exposure, the sardonic Claire inadvertently discovers just how easy it is to stretch out hotel stays without paying. Then it simply becomes a game to see how far she can push her luck without attracting the unwelcome attention of the desk clerk and security staff, how long she can put off paying the price for not paying her bill. And during her 13, 14, now 17 nights on the lam, missing appointments, avoiding her husband, her therapist, her e-mail, the phone messages stacked up like planes at a busy airport, she becomes convinced she has developed clairvoyant powers, able to see into the hearts and minds of people she encounters on the road. She also develops and perfects a series of lies– her son's a student at Brown, she's a cardiothoracic surgeon. But why stop there? Claire ups the ante by seducing Zach, a 17-year-old she meets while swimming at Philadelphia's Four Seasons Hotel–she chooses her accommodations based on the presence of a pool – and has an ill-advised if hilarious dinner with the kid and his divorced mother, Margot. "Right now," Claire says, considering her life, "I was just floating. Trying to float. Skimming over my life, letting life tickle my feet. I had no plans to glide off entirely. Soon, I would dip a toe in, test the temperature. Was this so bad? Why did I not have that right?" The considerable strength of Layover can be measured in the willingness of readers to give Claire the rights and privileges and emotional rope they'd probably withhold from others. I, for instance, understand the fling with Zach, even sort of understand the meal with his mom. But there are limits. I do not understand why, when she gets an unexpected call from Hillary Katzenbach, the woman– and pediatric heart surgeon– who briefly led her husband astray, she concocts an elaborate scheme to seduce Zach's lawyer father. Where is that supposed to get her? Why not go after Hillary's husband, a poet, whose collection of rhymes Claire spends an afternoon deconstructing in a local bookstore? Layover may have some questionable plot points and some stretches of self-indulgence. But for the most part, it has a terrific, unforced edginess and power–it's no accident that author Lisa Zeidner is a poet. And there are moments when she simply rips out your heart and hands it to you. "For a moment she looked at her boy the way I'd seen other mothers look at other sons," Claire thinks as she watches Margot gaze at Zach with "a look so imperceptible that maybe only someone who has mourned the death of a child or someone who couldn't have children and desperately wanted to, might register. Others could dismiss it as ordinary pride. But it's more complicated. Head pushed slightly back on their necks, as if they're trying to get the proper distance, to view whole what they have made." At bottom, that's the story of Layover : a woman trying to get the proper distance, learning that you can rack up impressive frequent-flier miles while still being stuck in exactly the same spot.
Joanne Kaufman is a frequent contributor to several publications, including The Wall Street Journal.
Calculated Risks BEFORE Lisa Zeidner settles into lunch at Cuvee Notre Dame, a restaurant in Philadelphia's trendy Fairmount section, she has to have her picture taken. The photographer seats her at the bar, then at a table next to an exposed-brick wall. There's a slight tension in the air, which Zeidner tries to diffuse by reassuring him she's not trying to be difficult– it's just that her face doesn't photograph well, Indeed, she says later, the person who took her book jacket photo said he could shoot her all day and still not get good smile. "He explained that none of my normal expression are available on camera," she reports without rancor. In person, Zeidner, small and birdlike in a simple, sleeveless dress that suits the punishingly hot day, displays a full emotional range. Today, enthusiasm for her latest novel, Layover, predominates. She's driven over 'from the nearby New Jersey suburb where she lives with her architect husband and 8-year-old son to talk about the book-a witty and contemplative tale of a woman who copes with the accidental death of her child in an unconventional way. Layover has generated the highly coveted buzz that publishers hope for. While Zeidner's two books of poetry and three previous novels have all been seriously considered this book s reception exceeds all pre-publication expectations. There's film-rights interest, paperback rights are about to be auctioned off and the hardcover is headed for its fourth printing (only five weeks after publication). As such, it could be considered the breakthrough novel for this 44-year-old writer, and she seems game to consider every aspect of its reception, negative or positive. For starters, there's the cover – a grainy photo of a naked woman sitting on the edge of a bed. "The brouhaha over the cover has been surprising," Zeidner says, quick to defend what she describes as a fairly tasteful art nude. "It's not a Hustler shot." Inside its covers, the book – which trails grief-stricken Claire Newbold as she goes on the lam from her husband, her job and, essentially her life-has been taken to task for Newbold's sexual encounters with a teenager she meets, and later, his father. Zeidner says she's used to vitriol in reviews, especially after her 1983 novel Alexandra Freed, which she describes as a "comedy about a date rape." Most of the reader comments on the online bookseller Amazon.com, for example, have been favorable, but not all, some accuse Newbold of using grief as an excuse for promiscuity. "Certainly, the novel posits that sex can be emotionally curate and restorative, and I suppose that isn't a fundamentalist principle," Zeidner says. But she still finds the focus on sex disproportionate, especially since only two sex acts actually occur. "Of course, they're very specific," she concedes wryly. More noteworthy, she thinks, is the way the book celebrates "grown-up sex," with a middle-aged heroine who's in charge of her own sexuality. But the wider society still sees "the range of acceptable behavior for women to be shockingly narrow." So is the range of acceptable writing, she asserts. "It's hard to get taken seriously as a female novelist. Men's fiction is more free to take linguistic risks. I feel fortunate that I actually seem to be getting people to notice this is a writerly book. It's not just a how-to article about marriage and parenthood." Despite its success, Zeidner contends the book can only do so well. "I still think there are only 20,000 readers of literary fiction in the world." Nonetheless, she seems committed to broadening that audience. She was misquoted, she says, in a trade magazine that claimed she'd set out to write a commercial novel. "Accessible," she corrects. "I see this as a novel with a lot of ideas in it, but I didn't want it to read like a philosophy course. I wanted to make sure the surface was light and jumpy and exciting enough that it could lure a reader in. I've lost patience with books that don't make the effort to do that. If I want to work without pleasure, I can read Proust." Zeidner's already at work on two more novels and finishing "Serial Monogamy," a collection of short stories. She manages to write on top of her responsibilities as director of the English graduate program at Rutgers University, where she has taught for the last 20 years. Lest she should get carried away with her own success, her son serves as a grounding force. Not only does he not know that a boy dies in the book, he doesn't seem to care. "All he knows," she says with a laugh, "is that a lot of things I have to do with this book make me unavailable to take him to the pool. He's really not very interested in it. In fact, after a snit fit I threw about literary matters, he said, 'So you got a lousy book report. So who cares?"' Lise Funderburg is the author of BIack, White, Other. Home / Books / Short Stories / Articles / Personal Essays / Reviews / Biography / At Rutgers University / Contact Lisa Zeidner |