With Tsing Loh (Depth Takes a Holiday) behind the wheel, readers are in for a crackling, witty, loop-the-loop ride—no air bags, no seatbelts—across the interior landscape of an almost-40 writer coping with the pressures and irritations of modern society. She targets such social phenomena as the Zone Diet, health clubs, plastic surgery and mass joke e-mails. Old standbys like marriage, older siblings, money and advertising are deftly dealt with, though she teeters on overkill with her primary obsession, aging. Tsing Loh, whose humorous neuroses will be familiar to listeners to public radio's Morning Edition
and Marketplace,
struggles with the friction between where she thinks her career, marriage, health and beauty should be and where they actually rate, with hilarious fallout. This self-described downwardly mobile nonachiever views the world through "dung-colored glasses," though her message brightens as she frees herself of youthful goals and comes to accept her age and station. Tsing Loh incorporates into her text crossed-out sentences, e-mail correspondence and outtakes from her television forays. Unfortunately, her frenetic pace and humor slow in the final section. And while the book's title suggests the looming presence of an oppressive Van Nuys, the Los Angeles suburb lacks the full intensity of Tsing Loh's ferocious stare, save for some early references (e.g., it regularly ranks as one of the worst places to live in America). But that unfulfilled promise shrinks in the face of Tsing Loh's white-knuckled, dirty-fingernailed imagination. (May)
Forecast:Tsing Loh will launch her new book at the
Los Angeles Times Book Festival, which she's emceeing, and will tour the West Coast. Readers throughout the rest of the nation should expect to hear Tsing Loh bemoaning Van Nuys on the radio, the first printing of 20,000 copies should sell briskly.
