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Latest Review: "Starlite Terrace" by Patrick Roth

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from Tiffany Nichols on Patrick Roth’s Starlite Terrace, from Seagull Books.

Tiffany also reviews literature in translation for the San Francisco and Sacramento Book Reviews and runs the mouthwatering food porn and book-geeking Tumblr blog tiffany ist. Here’s the beginning of her review:

Every fictional work set in L.A. begins with a slow crawl through its streets in the early hours of the morning right after sunrise. Maybe it’s always done this way to emphasize the vast sprawl of the city and highlight the loneliness of its inhabitants, or maybe it’s intended to emphasize that L.A., like New York, is only quiet from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Starlite Terrace is no different. So sit back, relax, and cruise around the streets of Sherman Oaks and Hollywood with no purpose or direction.

Starlite Terrace provides no new insights about L.A. or literary fiction, but its redeeming quality is that it seems to be a poetic extension of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, featuring analogous characters in their twilight years who were in their prime in the 50s and 60s instead of the 70s and 80s. These characters are as alone and lost as the ones of Less Than Zero, but more attached to reality—probably due to old age.

The work consists of four short stories related by loneliness and despair featuring a cast of residents living in the same apartment complex under the same name as the work. This collection of stories explores the lives of four respective residents through observations and interactions with other neighbors in the apartment complex. Like any apartment complex, the phenomena where neighbors who know the most about you are the ones you speak to the least holds true in Starlite Terrace. The first and last stories in the collection, which focus on loneliness and ill-formed memories based on illusion, frame the inner two stories concerning despair and taking desperate measures to find and attempt to win back lost loved ones.

For the rest of the review, go here.



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