Malaise FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Fleming Ford is an Alabama girl exiled to the West Coast, where she is torn between devotion to her husband and a dangerous love for an older Englishman who seems to embody the formality and culture lacking in her new home. California is to Fleming a desert of many kinds, but ultimately she is reluctantly drawn into the culture that she satirizes - its beautiful vistas, its citizens' endless quest for wellness, the narcotic effect of its perpetual sun. She soon finds herself at the mall or with a botanist, facialist, yoga instructor, or visceral manipulator. She must come to terms with the inhabitants' ceaseless plea to relax, their phobia of weather, their love of malls." Newly pregnant with her third child while her geologist husband is away searching for water in the barren deserts of the American West, Fleming seeks relief in the companionship of Mr. Lieberman, a British mogul sojourning in Los Angeles. To her, he represents the tragic yet glamorous Old World, the milestones of the twentieth century, and the battlefields of Europe.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New Yorker
Lemann's heroine, Fleming Ford, a native of Fort Defiance, Alabama, is the girl you knew in college who was just that much more thrilling than anyone else. What happened to her? She married her high-school sweetheart; she's living in Esperanza, California, while he's off drilling for water in the Mojave Desert; and her heart is being torn to shreds by a decrepit gentleman of the old school, Harry Lieberman, for whom she feels "a vast Cartesian adoration." Lieberman, a billionaire mogul, is susceptible to Fleming's attractions because he has recently lost his beloved wife, Adelaide -- also, as it happens, a daughter of Fort Defiance. Lemann's fourth novel is full of her customary antic charm, but here she has come up with something more: a beautifully nuanced anti-"Lolita," in which the object of desire, wandering around L.A. in a brocade dressing gown and alligator slippers, is the now vanished twentieth century.
Publishers Weekly
"There is nothing I love like decrepitude in a man." With that cheeky declaration, Lemann (The Fiery Pantheon) sums up the one-note plot of her latest novel, which tracks a fortyish woman's urge to have an affair with a geriatric business and entertainment tycoon. Fleming Ford is the sometimes outrageous narrator, a former belle from Alabama who finds herself pregnant and stranded in Southern California as her husband, the endearingly oafish Mac MacMoreland, works on a project to discover underground water that can be piped to Mexico for an enormous profit. Fleming has little interest in her husband's efforts and she seems mildly terrorized by the prospect of caring for her two toddler daughters, so she turns her attention to Mr. Lieberman, the reserved widower who once signed her paychecks when she worked for his New York newspaper. A chance encounter in New York fuels the attraction, and Fleming is startled when Lieberman follows up on the West Coast, proposing that Fleming make the journey from the rather depressing tourist town of Esperanza, where she lives, to visit him for lunch in Los Angeles. Their common Southern heritage generates a quaint attraction despite the age difference, but Lemann has precious little plot to offer beyond the affair, and while some of her cynical observations on SoCal culture are entertaining, many seem tired and familiar. Fleming is a wry, engaging protagonist, but she's not quite enough to make this novel a winner. (June) Forecast: Lemann's novel is based on a weeklong online diary she wrote for Slate.com about her life in San Diego. Readers who frequent the site may recognize her name, but it seems unlikely that many will want to pick up the book version of something that worked better in its original format. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Reading Lemann's Malaise is like watching Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge: you either love the eccentric, almost bizarre characters and quirky, playful style, or you are bored and irritated by the lack of plot and constant repetitions. For this reviewer, these mixed qualities add to the charm of Lemann's witty comedies of manners. In her fourth novel (after The Fiery Pantheon) Lemann returns to familiar themes displaced and debauched Southerners, the clash between the old and the new, and the search for love, honor, and home in a different setting (California). "The struggle between North and South was something I had always understood," says narrator Fleming Ford. "To add the West to the equation was something more than I could as yet comprehend." Recently exiled from New York to Esperenza (a.k.a. San Diego), the Alabama-born Fleming longs for the civilized traditions of the "beauty-haunted East Coast" while trying to resist the allure of the West Coast lifestyle (wearing shorts 365 days a year, indulging in energy work). "Paradise takes some getting used to," she notes wryly. "Paradise gives you stress, actually." Fleming also struggles to remain loyal to her often-absent husband while drawn to an older Englishman who represents "the glittering older world" she misses. Readers who enjoy Walker Percy and James Wilcox will delight in Lemann's latest. Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A sumptuously lazy fourth novel from Lemann (The Fiery Pantheon, 1998, etc.), this about a transplanted southerner adjusting to life in California. Narrator Fleming Ford has a lot to say about not much in particular, and God bless her for saying it. A journalist and mother from Alabama, she's married to engineer Mac, who's brought the family to Esperenza, California, on the desert near the Mexican border, while he works on a water project. Fleming is trying to keep her career with a New York newspaper going, but she's having a hard time coming up with stories, a problem not helped by her department's name of "New Perspectives." She's also falling in love with Mr. Lieberman, the English media tycoon and owner of the paper, whom she runs into on the street in New York. Slim, elegant, just dripping with Old World panache, he satisfies her need for a particular type of decadence plus offering link to her southern past (Lieberman's recently deceased wife hailed from Alabama as well). Meanwhile, Esperenza is driving Fleming to the brink: the never-changing weather, omnipresent mariachi bands, and beautiful houses cut from the desert five minutes prior to your moving in-it all breeds in her a desperate yearning for history, seediness, age. That her infatuation with Lieberman is pretty harmless is clear from the start, at least to the reader if not to the obsessing Fleming, who's worried about her marriage, even if nobody else is: "All men are dangerous until you get married. But of course after that they are lethal." Little plot-ground gets covered by the end, but that's all right. There's no need for plot if atmosphere, attitude, and plenty of good talk can carry you along. A seductive read-theliterary equivalent of a hammock, a warm breeze, and a tumbler of whiskey-certain to breed in readers a desire for decadent ennui and slow ruin.
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