The Lord's Motel: A Novel
A perfect example of the novel as soap bubble, this slight, lightly ironic first effort absorbs the reader but leaves little of substance behind. Told in the first person, it is the story of Colleen Sweeney, a 30-something "codependent" product of an alcoholic father and a battered mother. Having escaped to Houston, Colleen runs the Service-to-the-Unserved van for her local library, and lives in an apartment building called the Lord's Motel, complete with a crazed-but-empathetic New Age superintendent and three female neighbors. She has been looking for love in all the wrong places--specifically, with a psychologically abusive cruise ship director--but her chance for redemption is imminent. The narrative flies from subject to subject and setting to setting (prisons, houses of prostitution, emergency rooms), alighting so briefly that the potential of some weighty social issues is never developed. This is not a bad technique--too much attention to any one subject might have made the book maudlin. Moving though the fiction often is, however, the author's light touch finally saps her words of an ability to leave an imprint. The bubble of her work, which reflects truths of love, sex and family, eventually bursts, leaving an impression of evanescence. 10,000 first printing; author tour.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.