CAROUSEL OF PROGRESS

Rambling, casual and intermittently amusing, Tanney's debut novel chronicles four years in the life of teenager Meredith Herman and her classically dysfunctional family in the sun-filled world of upper-middle-class Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Fourteen when the tale begins, Meredith is the quintessential adolescent: equal parts brat, pal, navel-gazer and careful observer of what, from the opening pages, is clearly a marriage on the rocks. The trouble begins when her glamorous and mercurial mother, Leigh, disappears from a family vacation in Sonoma, driving back to L.A. with Meredith's younger brother and leaving Meredith and her father to find their own way home. After the drama of this minicrisis, Meredith settles into a chronicle of familiar family upheaval. That the book is divided into sections by year and chapters by month highlights a distressing truth: despite a succession of significant, even potentially life-altering events—Meredith's parents divorce; her father marries a dumpy screenwriter; her mother takes up with a string of bizarre boyfriends; Meredith gets a nose job, a mall job and a best friend—Tanney's characters remain unchanging, frustrating amalgams of clichés and inconsistencies. Family trips are the framework on which Tanney hangs her novel's important moments, from Leigh's dramatic exit from a Sonoma race track in the beginning to a disastrous Disneyland visit in the middle and a skiing venture at the book's end during which Meredith's maturation is signaled by her understanding of skiing, with its paradox of "control and letting go," as a pastime bearing relevance to life in general. The novel is just what its title promises—though with such a tight, claustrophobic angle on such a baffling set of characters, the metaphor of choice might, instead of a carousel, be a Sit 'n' Spin. (July 17)