{"id":829,"date":"2012-11-01T13:35:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T19:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=829"},"modified":"2012-11-01T13:36:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T19:36:00","slug":"laura-lippman-and-when-she-was-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/laura-lippman-and-when-she-was-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Lippman: And When She Was Good"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Laura Lippman keeps growing as a writer.\u00a0 For a reader, this is a true delight, and each novel is something of a surprise.\u00a0 She\u2019s hewing more, lately, to the standalone model than to the Tess Monaghan novels that started her career, and she has plenty to say.\u00a0 This novel is both a good story and a nuanced look at ethical behavior and choices.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Her central character is Heloise Lewis, who, it quickly becomes apparent, is a high class madam in the Heidi Fleiss mode.\u00a0 Making the novel a look at the politics of prostitution from the opening scene, Heloise overhears a conversation in line at the Starbucks about the recent suicide of a \u201csuburban madam\u201d.\u00a0 As she challenges the easy assumptions of the couple behind her in line, she\u2019s really challenging her own assumptions.\u00a0 The articulation of her thoughts to a strange couple merely starts her own thought process.<\/p>\n

Heloise, it becomes very clear, is a very smart and capable woman.\u00a0 She\u2019s also a very damaged one, and Lippman backtracks through her childhood to show the reader how she\u2019s ended up where she has.\u00a0 Her father was abusive, both verbally and physically, and her mother stood by and watched.\u00a0 Heloise gets out and away at an early age, though she segues quickly from stripper to hooker.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s when she meets Val, her boyfriend and then pimp, that her life becomes at once more simple and more complicated.\u00a0 As Heloise is a \u201cfavorite\u201d of Val\u2019s, she has a privileged position in his\u00a0 hierarchy.\u00a0 It suits her until she wants to start reading books, which she has to do on the sly.<\/p>\n

A catastrophic occurrence leaves Heloise visiting Val once a month in the Supermax prison near Baltimore, hiding the fact that she has a child, though not the fact that she\u2019s now a successful madam on her own terms.\u00a0 While the position of power should have shifted, it hasn\u2019t seemed to, and Heloise is still tithing to her former master.<\/p>\n

Heloise, cut off from normal life at an early age, is now trying to live it \u2013 and she approaches normalcy like a science, trying to do all the right things for her son.\u00a0 She\u2019s smart, so she can figure out how to behave and dress correctly, though she still holds herself at arm\u2019s length from the community of \u201cmoms\u201d, while at the same time being an almost perfect mom herself.<\/p>\n

As her son gets older he starts to wonder more about his Dad, about why there are no family members around, and though he\u2019s not figured out what his mom does, Heloise is starting to think it\u2019s only a matter of time.\u00a0 Her urgency in figuring out what to do about this is increased by the death of the suburban madam mentioned in the opening chapter and the reemergence of another fellow prostitute from back in the day with Val.<\/p>\n

Heloise\u2019s creditors \u2013 she has a few \u2013\u00a0are becoming demanding, and while she\u2019s smart she\u2019s not quite smart enough to escape a few of the traps laid for her.\u00a0\u00a0 Lippman\u2019s skill as a psychological suspense novelist dovetails nicely with her look at the life of women.\u00a0 Her theme seems to be that women, in all kinds of capacities \u2013 from stay at home mom to prostitute to even the \u201caverage\u201d lobbyist that Heloise pretends to be \u2013 are overlooked, diminished.\u00a0 While you may not always like Heloise you\u2019re still strangely on her side.\u00a0 You want her to figure out a way out of her troubles, as well as a way for her to behave like a normal woman.<\/p>\n

Lippman\u2019s resolution will no doubt stay with you.\u00a0 Her straightforward prose style cuts to the heart of any point she wants to make, and it\u2019s more memorable because of it.\u00a0 I can\u2019t wait for what might come next from the interesting and agile mind of Laura Lippman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Lippman keeps growing as a writer.\u00a0 For a reader, this is a true delight, and each novel is something of a surprise.\u00a0 She\u2019s hewing more, lately, to the standalone model than to the Tess Monaghan novels that started her career, and she has plenty to say.\u00a0 This novel is both a good story and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-psychological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}