{"id":2465,"date":"2014-08-19T06:48:42","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T10:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2015-01-04T07:09:05","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T12:09:05","slug":"mystery-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2465","title":{"rendered":"****Mystery Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Los<\/a>

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)<\/p><\/div>\n

By David Gordon<\/strong> \u2013 This book<\/a>\"\"
\nwas a gift, so I knew nothing about it when I opened its pages and fell in love with its surprises. Funny, complicated, well-drawn characters\u2014B-movie cinephiles\u2014living on the tattered fringes of Hollywood. \u201cSome things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another,\u201d said the New York Post<\/em> review. The story involves failed experimental novelist, abandoned husband, and tyro-detective Sam Kornberg\u2019s search for Mona Naught, a woman of elusive identity and tenuous reality.<\/p>\n

The first-person narrator\u2019s voice, occasionally uncertain, is consistently insightful and entertaining. Here\u2019s a description of a cemetery in Mexico: \u201ca city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever.\u201d <\/em>That last tiny zinger is what makes it.<\/p>\n

Or this unpromising exchange with the Korean housekeeper of his prospective employer, when she answered his knock:<\/p>\n

\u201cWarren?\u201d she asked. \u201cNo, I\u2019m not Warren. I\u2019m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cYou show warrant?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOh, warrant,\u201d I said. \u201cI thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don\u2019t know what you mean.\u201d . . . <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNorman?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNo, not Norman either. I\u2019m Sam.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. \u201cYou are Mormon.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA Mormon? No, I\u2019m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Occasionally, the narration is interrupted by other narrators, with their critical observations about Sam and his shortcomings, which put his actions in a new light. Author Gordon, in a recent New York Times<\/em> blog<\/a>, describes writing as a “risky, humiliating endeavor.” No surprise, maybe that about his writing, the fictional Sam is skewering: \u201cI myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn\u2019t seem to stop writing . . . It seemed I had dedicated my life to a question whose point even I had forgotten along the way.\u201d<\/em> His detecting assignment from Solar Lonsky helped him find it again.
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