Review by New York Times Review
NOT everyone who has a child is cut out to be a parent, and not every kid is cut out for a carefree childhood. There's no clean connection between these two accidents of character and fate. Hot-housed children can end up with blighted lives, while neglected kids can succeed and thrive as adults. Nonetheless, when Claire, one of the two women at the center of Mona Simpson's new novel, "My Hollywood," has a baby in her late 30s, she convinces herself not only that she's an unfit mother but that her 17-week-old son, Will (who "seemed more furious than other babies, more bereft") is aware of her shortcomings: "Will and I both felt astonished that he was stuck with me." Is an infant capable of such nuanced misgiving? Or could Claire be projecting? Taking no chances, she hires a nanny, Lola - a mother of five from the Philippines and the novel's other central character - to take care of Will and to lighten her psychic load. But eventually she starts to worry: What if the nanny isn't up to the job either? How can she know? Raised by a delusional and willful divorced mom, Claire has no road map for child-rearing. Her mother, though crazy, was spirited and assertive. Claire, though sane, is passive and self-doubting. "One tends not to emulate the mentally ill," she reflects. Yet, despite her perilous upbringing, Claire has turned out more than fine. She's a Guggenheim-winning composer, married to a man who writes for a hit television comedy, living in a nice (though rented) house in Santa Monica. Just weeks into her life as a new mother, left alone with the baby while her husband vanishes into his unending workday, Claire sees why "so many people feel mad at their mothers; because whatever childhood was or wasn't, they're the ones who made it. Fathers loomed above it all, high trees." Claire loves her son, but music has always been "the true great thing" in her life, and the new love doesn't cancel out the old. Gazing at her baby, she thinks fearfully, "Someday you will come to me and ask, Did I do my best?" But she also fears that she will never again give her best to her work. Enter the nanny. The relationship between modern mothers and the people who look after their children is a subject ripe for exposé. Indeed, a bumper crop has already fallen from that tree. In 2002, the satiric novel "The Nanny Diaries," set in Manhattan, caricatured Park Avenue mothers as grotesque narcissists. The next year, in the play "Living Out," Lisa Loomer dramatized the unequal power dynamic between Latina child-minders in Los Angeles and their Anglo bosses, focusing on a Salvadoran nanny and the entertainment lawyer who employs her. Loomer showed more compassion for the nanny than for the mother. (Who could pity a corporate lawyer?) Since then, a laundry basket's worth of nonfiction titles have piled up, replacing the Technicolor Mary-Poppins-and-Mrs.-Banks myth with the unbleached reality of contemporary child care, from "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy," edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, to "And Nanny Makes Three," by Jessika Auerbach. In "And Nanny Makes Three," Auerbach, a career woman who raised four children on three continents with the aid of 19 nannies, au pairs and baby sitters, addressed the emotional and practical fallout that results from outsourcing nurturers. But she also reminded her readers that nannies, known in East Asia as amahs, are working women too. "To their relatives back home," Auerbach writes, "whom they frequently support, feed, clothe and send to school with a large chunk of their monthly salary, the amahs are the ones who have made it." "Who's to say," she adds, "that a mother should never abandon her children when her only alternative is to raise them in poverty in a country that is deeply and systemically corrupt, with no prospects whatsoever?" But who looks after the amah's children while she tends to her foreign charges? In "My Hollywood," a compassionate fictional exploration of this complicated global relationship, Simpson assesses the human cost that the child-care bargain exacts on the amah, on her employer and on the children of both. Claire and Lola take turns narrating the novel, each in her own voice - Claire's intellectualized and anxious, Lola's down-to-earth and pragmatic. Simpson allots each woman her portion of sympathy, giving context and legitimacy to their contrasting social worlds. Both women regard themselves as onlookers in the Hollywood scene, even though they're inside the gate. Claire, attending a party with her husband's high-powered friends, feels let down. "Before I lived here," she thinks, "if I'd heard the words Hollywood party, I'd have pictured ball gowns and men in tuxedos. If I'd imagined servants at all, they'd have been in black and white too. But the men here turned their baseball caps backward. The nannies wore everyday clothes." Lola, who knows she should work for a wealthier woman than Claire, so as to send more money back home to her family in Tagaytay, stays with her out of love for the baby she calls Williamo. Liking to feel needed, she boasts, "My employer, she says when a baby comes home from the hospital, a Filipina should arrive with him." But is Lola truly indispensable to Claire, and vice versa? Lola tells her Filipino friends: "We are status symbols. Like a BMW." Paul and Claire's friends try to poach Lola full time after hiring her to work for them on the weekends. But the nannies know that one wrong move could land them on a plane back to Manila. Ignoring that specter, they jockey for position like trophy wives, aware at all times of the risk of divorce, rupture, reversal. "We compare jobs," Lola observes, "the way women compare husbands." Lola defends Claire for caring about her career: "My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children. It is for them that you are working!" But it confuses her when she learns that Claire earns less for her compositions than Lola earns for looking after Williamo. "A mystery. She is doing this for something else. It does not pay," Lola thinks. "Me, I work for money." But does she? Over the years, Lola sends home enough money to establish all five of her children in the "professional class," justifying her long absence by reasoning, "Even children understand money." When at last she returns to Tagaytay, her relatives seem like strangers, and she misses the American children she left behind. "How can I live here?" she wonders. Does her family in the Philippines still need her? And what about the families in California? Will they find another Lola? Could they? Subtly, almost dispassionately, Simpson works her habitual magic, showing how love travels, ownerless and unbidden, among children who need adults, and adults who need children. "Children, they are dependent for their life," Lola observed back in Santa Monica. But so are adults. Sitting with her friends, drinking "nonfat lattes, ice blendeds, a dozen small consolations," Claire asks, "For what, exactly, were mothers always being consoled?" Simpson gently suggests an answer: for their fear of failing in their responsibilities to their children and themselves, the extent of which they'll know only when their children grow up, and tell them what they were. 'My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children.' Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 15, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Novel by novel, Simpson takes fresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husband's television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claire's deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a composer and new mother, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., so that her husband, Paul, can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul's job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, William, and soon Lola's trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul's slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternating chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson's taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson's latest is well worth the wait. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Simpson's fifth novel, her first in ten years, is a contemporary look at the dual levels of Hollywood households reminiscent of the Masterpiece Theatre series Upstairs, Downstairs. The story centers on Claire, a composer and overwhelmed new mother, and her son's nanny, Lola, a middle-aged Filipina working to open up avenues of opportunity for her own five children. As with the TV series, it is the hired help whose stories are the most engaging and revealing. The novel can drag through all of Claire's angst and marital jealousies and woes, but Lola's inside views of her multiple employers and insights from The Book of Ruth, a nanny's survival guide, together with Bhama Roget's skilled narration, make this worth experiencing. [The Knopf hc was recommended for those "intrigued by the rich but unseen lives of the domestic class Ø la Gosford Park," LJ 8/10.-Ed.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria College, Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This dour take on class and immigration from Simpson (Off Keck Road, 2001, etc.) focuses on a circle of wealthy Hollywood families and the nannies who care for their spoiled children.Classical composer Claire moves with husband Paul and new baby William to Los Angeles where Paul pursues his dream to become a sitcom writer. Unable to concentrate on her music, Claire resents carrying most of the responsibility for William. Although she declares her maternal love frequently, readers don't see much evidence. After Paul's mother suggests she hire live-in help so she can work, Claire, whose carelessness as a parent grows only more mind-boggling as the novel progresses, finds Lola sitting on a park bench and hires her. Claire, or rather William, has lucked out. Lola had a comfortably middle-class life in the Philippinesa husband working as an illustrator for Hallmark, a house in the suburbs, her kids in a good school where she was President of the Parents Associationbut she has come to the States to earn her children's way through university and graduate school. While Claire is never comfortable with the parents of William's friends, Lola quickly becomes the unspoken leader of the mostly Filipino nannies who care for them. William is a difficult child with limited social skills, but Lola loves him. She turns down a job offer from another family, sacrificing a significant raise in pay, only to be fired by Claire at the recommendation of William's kindergarten teacher. Claire soon realizes she made a mistake, but Lola has already moved on to care for Laura, the possibly brain-damaged daughter of a single working mother, whose love and need for Lola is deeper than William's.Simpson trades chapters between Claire and Lola's viewpoints, but Claire never becomes Lola's equal, as a character or as a human being.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
