My Hollywood

Starred review from June 28, 2010
In her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a composer and new mother, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., so that her husband, Paul, can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul's job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, William, and soon Lola's trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul's slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternating chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson's taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson's latest is well worth the wait.

August 1, 2010

This dour take on class and immigration from Simpson (Off Keck Road, 2001, etc.) focuses on a circle of wealthy Hollywood families and the nannies who care for their spoiled children.

Classical composer Claire moves with husband Paul and new baby William to Los Angeles where Paul pursues his dream to become a sitcom writer. Unable to concentrate on her music, Claire resents carrying most of the responsibility for William. Although she declares her maternal love frequently, readers don't see much evidence. After Paul's mother suggests she hire live-in help so she can work, Claire, whose carelessness as a parent grows only more mind-boggling as the novel progresses, finds Lola sitting on a park bench and hires her. Claire, or rather William, has lucked out. Lola had a comfortably middle-class life in the Philippines—a husband working as an illustrator for Hallmark, a house in the suburbs, her kids in a good school where she was President of the Parents Association—but she has come to the States to earn her children's way through university and graduate school. While Claire is never comfortable with the parents of William's friends, Lola quickly becomes the unspoken leader of the mostly Filipino nannies who care for them. William is a difficult child with limited social skills, but Lola loves him. She turns down a job offer from another family, sacrificing a significant raise in pay, only to be fired by Claire at the recommendation of William's kindergarten teacher. Claire soon realizes she made a mistake, but Lola has already moved on to care for Laura, the possibly brain-damaged daughter of a single working mother, whose love and need for Lola is deeper than William's.

Simpson trades chapters between Claire and Lola's viewpoints, but Claire never becomes Lola's equal, as a character or as a human being.  

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August 1, 2010

Simpson, who in her first novel, Anywhere but Here, chronicled a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, here explores the world of Filipino nannies caring for American children. Writing from two perspectives, she invites us into the minds of Lola, who has left her own family for many years to make enough money to put her children through college, and Claire, whose difficult son Lola helps raise. The setting is Hollywood, where Claire's workaholic husband struggles to find success as a sitcom writer. Most affecting in this story is the portrait of Lola as she comes to love her charges, only to find herself dismissed when her services are no longer needed or become unaffordable. She is caught between her own family, whom she no longer knows, and the employers who don't fully value her contributions. Not quite as interesting is Claire, who can't find success anywhere: as a composer, a mother, or a wife. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Simpson's and for readers intrigued by the rich but unseen lives of the domestic class a la Gosford Park. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/10.]--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2010
Novel by novel, Simpson takes fresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husbands television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claires deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)