[REVIEW] Lisa Jewell, One-Hit Wonder
Apr. 6th, 2006 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldLisa Jewell's 2001 novel One-Hit Wonder certainly classifies as chick lit, with its female protagonist and her story of self-discovery and self-empowerment. I don't see why this should discourage me from reading it. After all, as Anjura Razdan wrote in the Utne Review in 2004, the genre's examination of the situation of the single woman in the postmodern urban world owes quite a lot to the novel of manners exemplified by Jane Austen. She's part of the canon, isn't she?
Living a depressed solitary life in the house of her hypochondriac mother, Ana is jolted out of her life by the news that her older half-sister, the briefly famous pop-music star Bee Bearhorn, has been found dead in her posh London apartment. Ana never had a chance to know Bee very well in life, Bee's Madonna-like fame sitting ill with shy young Ana, and their mother's self-aggrandizing machinations after the AIDS-related death of Bee's pushing them apart permanently. Sent by her mother to gather Bee's possessions, Ana soon starts to wonder what happened to the half-sister she never knew. Why did she permanently retreat from stardom? Who was she having an affair with? Was it suicide? With her sister's friends, she sets to investigate her sister's life in the search for these questions, and in so doing perhaps decide who she herself is.
Yes, Ana's trajectory from single isolated repression to partnered connected openness is a stereotypical trajectory, but Jewell manages to make the trajectory convincing. Ana's character is well-written, her timidity and shock shifting over the course of the novel to a conviction that she can do better for herself believably. The pairing of the main narrative with chapters told from Bee's point of view, taken from episodes in her life, nicely frames the similarities and differences between the two separated siblings, creating a sense of dynamic tension. Perhaps the book's fluff, but it's certainly enjoyable and well-structured fluff. Think a layer cake.
Living a depressed solitary life in the house of her hypochondriac mother, Ana is jolted out of her life by the news that her older half-sister, the briefly famous pop-music star Bee Bearhorn, has been found dead in her posh London apartment. Ana never had a chance to know Bee very well in life, Bee's Madonna-like fame sitting ill with shy young Ana, and their mother's self-aggrandizing machinations after the AIDS-related death of Bee's pushing them apart permanently. Sent by her mother to gather Bee's possessions, Ana soon starts to wonder what happened to the half-sister she never knew. Why did she permanently retreat from stardom? Who was she having an affair with? Was it suicide? With her sister's friends, she sets to investigate her sister's life in the search for these questions, and in so doing perhaps decide who she herself is.
Yes, Ana's trajectory from single isolated repression to partnered connected openness is a stereotypical trajectory, but Jewell manages to make the trajectory convincing. Ana's character is well-written, her timidity and shock shifting over the course of the novel to a conviction that she can do better for herself believably. The pairing of the main narrative with chapters told from Bee's point of view, taken from episodes in her life, nicely frames the similarities and differences between the two separated siblings, creating a sense of dynamic tension. Perhaps the book's fluff, but it's certainly enjoyable and well-structured fluff. Think a layer cake.
