I may be judging this more harshly because I tend to have high expectations when it comes to Alison Lurie. And she didn't entirely disappoint me; her characters are multifaceted creatures and she can write a fabulous sentence. This wasn't one of her better books, though."The Nowhere City" is about a 1960s academic couple who moves to LA from New England so he can take a job as a historian for a government company (incidentally, while the book was highly dated it was interesting to see how people thought and talked back then). Paul, the husband, immediately falls in love with LA and begins an affair with a beatnik waitress; his wife Katherine finds herself both physically and emotionally allergic to the place. Things develop in an interesting way, though, and the ending is not what the reader might have predicted at first.After a somewhat slow start I found the story well-written and decently paced, but the characters, though well-drawn, were highly unsympathetic. Like many of Lurie's male characters, Paul is basically a self-centered jerk. Katherine, on the other hand, was extremely whiny and annoying (I couldn't stand all her talk about her sinusitis and the need to drain her nasal passages) -- an instance of effective characterization, I suppose, but not someone I wanted to read about. Part of me admired Lurie's ability to make the story three-dimensional by showing how Paul might understandably be thoroughly sick of Katherine, and also by paving the way for Katherine's eventual growth and development. I still thought Paul was a jerk, though, for wanting to simply engage in affairs according to his whim while staying married to Katherine with no apparent guilt or self-criticism, and given that Katherine's later redemption comes about through an extramarital affair of her own, I couldn't sympathize much with her either. So ultimately, a decently written but not very enjoyable story for me. It didn't hold a candle to Alison Lurie's better books, like Imaginary Friends or The War Between the Tates.
I love this book! It's especially interesting when you can connect the characters with people that Lurie knew in real life. Can you guess which character was inspired by Carolyn See?
What do You think about The Nowhere City (1997)?
It's hard to find novels about LA that aren't bogged down with cliches. Or novels in which the cliches, at least, are explored in an original way. Carolyn See and Eve Babitz are best at understanding (and then writing about) the uniqueness of the city, to my mind. Though I don't rank The Nowhere City in their league, I do think Alison Lurie wrote a smart, insightful book. An East Coast professor and his wife come to the city for a year while he works on a history project for a research company; he loves LA & she hates it for all the reasons East Coast people always seem to hate LA. Lack of seasons, shallow behavior, casual clothing (the book was published in 1965; I laughed at the complaints about capris) and and and. He loves it because he finds a sense of freedom he's never known before; he also discovers the pleasures of anonymity. But then the book slowly begins to twist. And even though the reader can see some of what's coming, and even though there is a Hollywood starlet and houses built like Norman castles and freeways being built, the pleasure is being along for to the ride. The how is what makes this book so satisfying. The Nowhere City should definitely be on lists that include Fante, West and the like. Not only because it adds substance to the body of literature written about LA but because Lurie is a fine writer - a master of nuance and a terrific satirist.
—Kim Fay
