Year in Van Nuys FROM THE PUBLISHER
Sandra Tsing Loh, a self-described neurotic, nonachieving, downwardly mobile "Dumpy," has started to come out of denial over the fact that she does not live in Provence. Not only does she not live in Provence, she doesn't even live in a nice part of Los Angeles. This upper-lower-middle-class suburb in the sun-swept grid of the San Fernando Valley, consistently ranked one of the worst places to live in America, whose night sky is flamed by a million fast-food neon signs and whose streets are chockablock with carnicerias, taquerias, and pupuserias, will, she's pretty sure, never be Provence. And that's just the point. While Sandra feels that by now she should be in the second act of a well-off if quietly lived life, growing her own basil and remodeling a falling-down rustic farmhouse (if not in Provence, at the very least in Sante Fe), she is not. Neither are most of us, unless we happen to be Francis Mayes or Peter Mayle. So let's celebrate that fact, which is exactly what Sandra does in this hilarious send-up -- a year in the life of a resident of a place that non other than Robert Redford called a "furnace that could destroy any creative thought that managed to creep into your brain."
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
With Tsing Loh (Depth Takes a Holiday) behind the wheel, readers are in for a crackling, witty, loop-the-loop rideno air bags, no seatbeltsacross the interior landscape of an almost-40 writer coping with the pressures and irritations of modern society. She targets such social phenomena as the Zone Diet, health clubs, plastic surgery and mass joke e-mails. Old standbys like marriage, older siblings, money and advertising are deftly dealt with, though she teeters on overkill with her primary obsession, aging. Tsing Loh, whose humorous neuroses will be familiar to listeners to public radio's Morning Edition and Marketplace, struggles with the friction between where she thinks her career, marriage, health and beauty should be and where they actually rate, with hilarious fallout. This self-described downwardly mobile nonachiever views the world through "dung-colored glasses," though her message brightens as she frees herself of youthful goals and comes to accept her age and station. Tsing Loh incorporates into her text crossed-out sentences, e-mail correspondence and outtakes from her television forays. Unfortunately, her frenetic pace and humor slow in the final section. And while the book's title suggests the looming presence of an oppressive Van Nuys, the Los Angeles suburb lacks the full intensity of Tsing Loh's ferocious stare, save for some early references (e.g., it regularly ranks as one of the worst places to live in America). But that unfulfilled promise shrinks in the face of Tsing Loh's white-knuckled, dirty-fingernailed imagination. (May) Forecast: Tsing Loh will launch her new book at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, which she's emceeing, and will tour the West Coast. Readers throughout the rest of the nation should expect to hear Tsing Loh bemoaning Van Nuys on the radio, the first printing of 20,000 copies should sell briskly. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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