For some reason I thought this was going to be dystopian. Instead, it's just kind of bad, in a 'bad first novel that shows promise' kind of way. And indeed 'Eat the Document,' while far from great, was substantially better than LF. Hopefully Stone Arabia is another big step up.

Do you like bad Don Delillo? Because I'm ambivalent even about moderately good Don Delillo, but Spiotta here has reproduced everything that's unpleasant about his worst books--the stylized but also fakely-naturalized dialogue about ideas that aren't interesting; the random fragmentation of text with no real payoff; the slickness. It's icky. It's not very interesting. It contains what felt like an infinite number of sentences starting "She [verb]", followed by another short sentence starting the same way, followed by another short sentence starting the same way. I assume this choice was meant to do something for me, but it did not.

LF is interesting, though, as a kind of half-way house between the hoary old pomo Delillo stuff (po-faced satire of late capitalism, symbols that are meant to be deeply meaningful but are too often just kind of silly) and the post-9/11 'we should all be very unironic now because irony caused 9/11 but my characters don't seem to know this' stuff. The heroes of LF, if I can simplify wildly, are a housefrau dedicated only to her children, and a possibly schizophrenic academic. They each feel things deeply. They're each set apart from the upper-middle class fads and obsession with surfaces. The academic reads Wittgenstein, and not that easy late stuff, no, he reads the Tractatus, though this and his obsession with the Lightning Field show that he's also deeply flawed because he wants things to be perfectly ordered. The housefrau has a chance to help the academic, but doesn't, because she wants to care for her children.

Meanwhile, the two main characters drive to New York, then go back to LA very soon afterward.

So at some point someone can write a dissertation about the shift from postmodernism to whatever we're all reading now (a friend of mine calls one side of it the 'novel of detachment' in a recent Nation piece. Go Jon!), and as well as DFW, they can point to LF as a missing link. Sadly, I don't want to read these books, and I will not be re-reading this. ( )

I gave up on this novel after 61 pages. Although it was chosen as a "notable book" by the New York Times and "book of the year" by the LA Times, it must have been too highbrow for me. I never was sure what was going on. ( )