Layover - Softcover

Zeidner, Lisa; Random House Inc.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060956496 ISBN 13: 9780060956493

Publisher: HarpPeren, 2000

Synopsis

Claire Newbold is not your typical heroine. Smart and sexy, yes, but she's also been known to sneak into a hotel room or two without paying, seduce a teenager in wet bathing trunks, and just check out of things altogether--like her job. And her marriage. No wonder, though. Claire's been careening off heartbreak. Her only child has died, she may be infertile, and her husband has had an affair.

No longer a mother, not sure she wants to be a wife, Claire moves from hotel to hotel, basking in the anonymity of travel and forbidden sex. She even comes to believe she is clairvoyant, able to "read" into the souls of others. Eventually she begins to see into her own soul as she ponders whether or not to return home. As she struggles to repair her marriage and her life, Claire surprises herself -- and us -- by emerging with a new sense of redemption.

 

About this title

Review:

Writing about grief has been the death of many a novelist--artistically speaking, that is. Even the most earnest attempts to describe this taxing and tenacious emotion can dip into bathos and rhetorical wire-pulling. In Layover, however, Lisa Zeidner gives grief its due, and does so with such wit and high style that the reader's (occasional) tears are mixed with a kind of elation. Exactly what is Claire Newbold mourning? Mostly the death of her young son, which has taken place some time before the novel opens. In response, she's withdrawn from her husband (a no-less-shattered surgeon) and her job (a sales rep for a medical-supplies company), allowing herself just the faintest purchase on her old existence: "Right now, I realize, I was just floating. Trying to float. Skimming over my life, letting life tickle my feet. I had no plans to glide off entirely." Gliding off entirely, however, is exactly what she does after learning of a single infidelity on her husband's part. In the middle of a business trip she cuts off all contact with home and lurches into a sex-and-self-discovery spree.

Sneaking in and out of hotel rooms without registering--which, let's face it, is the final eradication of identity for any business traveler--Claire first seduces an 18-year-old, then manages to get in bed with the boy's father. Zeidner records these trysts with superb, hypersensitive relish, finding fresh ways to write about that topic, too. "Sex is a story you know the ending of," she notes. "More or less the same story with the same ending, every time. Yet we want to keep hearing it, the way a child listens to a fairy tale, vigilant for variation." Still, Layover is anything but a bedroom farce. As Claire bounces between erotic encounters, she is unraveling before our eyes, and Zeidner's real subject turns out to be not body but soul:

I'd discovered grief's trade secret: once you burrow that deep into yourself, you simply have a better nose for pain. Truth is, hardly anyone is happy. Not even the people with nothing wrong. They're all hunkered down in the bunker of self, in self's fragile failure.

There is so much to praise in Layover that it's hard to know where to start, or to stop. It's diabolically funny, deeply intelligent, and surely the best work of hotel- or motel-room anthropology since Humbert Humbert did his cross-country trek. At one point, however, Claire ascribes a kind of clairvoyance to herself: she can see into people, she claims, while their souls "glow phosphorescent, as if X-rayed by the baggage-check machine." Zeidner has a similar, semi-radiant insight into human behavior--and hers, of course, is anything but a delusion. --James Marcus

From the Back Cover:

"The psychic death, and rebirth, of a saleswoman, Layover is a chillingly modern pilgrimage: rental cars and anonymous rooms in franchise hotels, crisp bills from automated tellers, the music of e-mail chimes and electronic pagers. Lisa Zeidner writes with the precision and the ear of the poet she is."
--Kathryn Harrison

"If anyone ever called for the phrase 'too smart for her own good,' it would seem to be the heroine of Lisa Zeidner's mordant, often terrifyingly funny, new novel. Claire Newbold is unraveling, but she doesn't drop a single witty stitch of observation, metaphor, and judgment--about anything. Too smart for her own good? Maybe, maybe not. She's definitely not too smart for ours. Layover is a nervy, racehorse performance."
--Thomas Mallon

"Lisa Zeidner's rare gift is her ability to balance sharp contemporary reportage with a timeless understanding of the heart. Layover lays bare the profound relationship between sex and hope. And as a lovely bonus to its wisdom and grace of language, it's as much fun to read as having all your travel and accommodations upgraded to first class."

--Rafael Yglesias

About this edition

• Publisher: HarpPeren
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0060956496
• ISBN 13: 9780060956493
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288