Exquisite Mariposa

Duncan’s disappointing metafictional debut follows narrator Fiona Alison Duncan—who shares the same name and some biographical details with the author—a woman in her late 20s who’s just made the cross-country move from New York to Los Angeles. In L.A., she finds a communal living situation at a house named La Mariposa, which comes complete with a revolving door of roommates, most of them women or femme, all endlessly fascinating to Fiona. Fiona is immediately struck with the idea to pitch her and her roommates to a producer as a reality TV show—“The Real World meets Instagram,” as a producer puts it. But the longer Fiona lives in L.A., the more she yearns to live fully in the Real, “a mode of perception” whose defining characteristic is “not trying.” So she embarks on a loosely transformative journey, culminating in a road trip to Toronto, taking the exact route her parents took while her mother was pregnant with her. Ping-ponging from dildos to astrology to capitalism and cultural capital, Duncan’s novel is suffused with trite observations passed off as wisdom. This chatty, unfocused story never finds its footing. [em](Oct.) [/em]