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This was a somewhat uneven reading experience for me, but in the end I am glad I read the book. There were moments of true brilliance, sometimes sustained stretches of true brilliance (the Kardashian birthday party is worth the price of admission), and that is rare and special enough to make this a book I recommend. A 3.5.

I never understand why literary types who don't want to work in film and television move to LA. It is not a town that celebrates genteel poverty, that finds charm in actual bohemians, but our protagonist, Jane, and her husband Lenny have chosen to build lives there. Jane is a writer who has been working on her second novel for a decade. It becomes a sprawling tale of the mulatto in America (mulatto is the word Jane chooses and there is a great deal of discussion in the book as to why it is the correct word.) She supports her family on the meager pay of an adjunct writing prof at an okay liberal arts college. Lenny is a painter who sells very little, in part, it is supposed by Jane and others because he won't lean into the Black. Instead, he paints abstracts that have no relation to race. To survive in LA the family becomes peripatetic. They live a year here and a year there when they find cheap options since they do not have the funds to buy a house or rent long-term in a neighborhood with good schools for their kids. The moving is starting to impact the kids and the marriage. All Jane wants is a giant house in a swanky neighborhood (which she calls "Multicultural Mayberry"), and maybe tenure. I don't want to spoil anything. I will say that Jane goes through something destabilizing and begins to lose her sense of herself and her values and things happen. The racial politics of it all is subtle and interesting. Jane herself is exhausting, shockingly naive, and rigid. Perhaps because she has spent a life mulatto masking she does not have a sense of who she really is and what she really wants and so aspires to be what she thinks people want her to be. She looks to what is reflected back by the people around her to determine what matters.

I thought parts of this were overwritten and parts underwritten. I needed so much more about her whole relationship and her dealings with Brett, the friend in whose house the family is living while Brett and family are abroad working on a project. There is drama in that relationship but it is not teed up well. The resolution of that drama is even more badly botched. (The Brett storyline maybe should be excised instead of augmented. It doesn't work as is.) We also need more backstory on why Jane falls for the machinations of the villain here. That we are dealing with a con man could not be more clear if he had a neon sign that flashed his endgame. She is feeling vulnerable and that can make a person sloppy, but she is too smart and sophisticated to have fallen for a little flattery. It was like a scene from The Music Man. I would have also liked more insight into Lenny and into Lenny and Jane's relationship. That coupling shifts around a bit, as long-term relationships do, but shifts and inconsistency are different things. It is weird how Lenny responds to some things with a preternatural calm while other things that seem less problematic upset him a great deal. I think Lenny's behaviors could make sense, but we have to know more about what is going on in Lenny's head for it to work. There are a lot of snippets that show how Jane's upbringing impacted her, but again, I needed more to fully understand her. She mentions several times how terrible it was that her mother chose the poverty of life as a poet and the emotional remove from her children because her emotions went to her work, but then Jane does the same thing to her kids. Why, if that was her driving desire to not be like her mother did she decide to be a novelist and leave the vast majority of childrearing to her husband? I am not saying that there could not be a narrative that makes that make sense, just that the narrative wasn't here. I could pull out other examples of things underwritten, but you get the idea, and it would be hard to do without spoilers. The book is pretty short, under 300 pages, so there was space to make this all work. Also, as mentioned, some things that were overwritten. If those storylines were pared there would be space to delve into the things that mattered. I think the story of their youngest child's learning disabilities was overwritten. It ended up not mattering. A one-sentence mention that the child had learning differences and that made it especially important that they live in a place with good schools would have been enough, but instead we get many many many pages about this very odd child. There is a point in the story where there is a potential legal action, and the legal advice here is wrong. (In a former incarnation I was an intellectual property lawyer so it really annoyed me.) No spoilers, but tons of evidence was overlooked and there was a pretty strong case that was ignored. More important than the error was that too much time is spent on the possibility of a legal matter and then that storyline just ends. A lot of things in the book just end and they should have been cut out or fleshed out.

As I said at the beginning, I generally enjoyed the read and recommend it, but it was also not close to the book it could have been and that is a shame. Senna is funny and deeply observant and I want more from her. Maybe next book?