GOD-SHAPED HOLE

DeBartolo’s screenwriting experience (Dream for an Insomniac) shows in her debut novel, a star-crossed romance in the hipper outreaches of Los Angeles.

The first sentence tells the whole tale: “When I was twelve, a fortune-teller told me that my one true love would die young and leave me all alone.” Beatrice Jordan was at a splashy Hollywood bash with her entertainment lawyer father when she heard that fortune. She is now your typical jaded and cynical twentysomething child of LA riches. She hasn’t spoken to her father since he left the family, and she doesn’t think so highly of her mother either. A designer of one-of-a-kind jewelry selling to places like Barney’s, Beatrice proclaims her outsider status with great pride and no apparent sense of irony. She is also lonely, so she answers a personal ad (readers’ responses to the book may be gauged by whether they find the ad charmingly deep or pretentiously dumb) that’s been placed by one Jacob Grace. Jacob and Beatrice recognize quickly that they’re soulmates: he’s a romantic ideal—kind, witty, intense, and troubled by his father’s abandonment when he was an infant. He and Trixie (that’s what he calls her) make love a lot (graphically described), eat at wonderfully quirky restaurants, share their intellectual pretensions (much hip namedropping—Nick Drake, John Fante, etc.), and help each other come to terms with their fatherly pasts. The romance has rough patches, but it’s true love, and, not so gradually, Jacob wears down Beatrice’s cynical resistance to trusting him not to leave her the way her father did. When he sells his first novel, they plot their escape from Los Angeles. But all along Beatrice has had troubling dreams of Jacob being swallowed by a whirlpool, and, sure enough, with only 30 pages to go, tragedy strikes. DeBartolo’s combination of one-liners and three-hankie tearjerking is skillful—and transparently manipulative.

This generation’s Love Story.