Babe in Paradise: Fiction - Hardcover

Silver, Marisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393020037 ISBN 13: 9780393020038

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2001

Synopsis

A collection of short stories journeys into the lives of characters who live on the periphery of the glamour and success of modern-day Los Angeles.

About this title

About the Author

Marisa Silver made her fictional debut in The New Yorker. She has previously worked as a feature film director and lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

Silver sets her oblique, atmospheric tales against the backdrop of a sprawling Los Angeles in this uneven but promising first short story collection. Many of the nine stories are equipped with painfully real characters and strikingly inventive writing, but too often an exciting premise leads to a dead end, and characters metamorphose in ways that go unexplored. In "Statues," for example, a recently married couple, struggling to feel at home in L.A., winds up at the home of two adult-film impresarios, where without much preamble (or motivation) the young wife asks them to "make a movie of her." After an anticlimactic filming scene, the story ends abruptly in the middle of the couple's tense ride home. Silver may be at her best when channeling the intensely tribal world of girls: through a character named Babe, featured in three of the stories, we see the fate that awaits a young woman in L.A. who is neither beautiful, happy nor rich and more gratifyingly, we see how she manages to redeem herself. Several stories offer an alternately affectionate and frightening view of L.A.'s car culture. In "What I Saw from Where I Stood," one of the more powerful and taut entries, a carjacking spurs a tragic emotional response in a young woman who has recently miscarried a baby, while her husband looks on, helpless to save her. As a whole, the collection is a nod to the "other" great American metropolis: L.A.'s unique ability to be "everywhere and nowhere at the same time" is carefully, almost reverently documented. Sporadically illuminating if ultimately disappointing, Silver's tales aim to show how, with a little bravery, anyone can learn to love the City of Angels. 5-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Silver's stories gained her critical acclaim in the New Yorker last year. The stories collected in her first book are set in a harsh Los Angeles, in which people just barely get by. A woman called Babe is often either central or incidental in them. She battles the raging fires that threaten her house and the sanity of her unstable mother in the title story. She is apprehended as a burglar in "Thief," provoking a redemption. Later, as a chauffeur in "The Passenger," she traumatically discovers the cargo abandoned by some passengers who suddenly disappeared. In other stories, a couple comes to terms with losing their child after a carjacking and an elderly mother finally comes to terms with the Holocaust, a topic she has avoided almost all her life. Silver's stories present Los Angeles as it exists apart from the glamour of Hollywood, and they show that there is drama enough in common, everyday life. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393020037
• ISBN 13: 9780393020038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 233