She luckily finds best friend Rose, an adopted child with a permissive mother. They meet in high school and dub themselves the “Lolas,” after The Kinks song of the same name. Meidav opens with Vic on death row approaching execution for an unspecified crime. Lana, who felt that the “most safety she had ever gotten from staying close to her parents had been the chance to spy on the wreckage of adult life,” has disappeared from her parent’s and Rose’s life. Rose has taken it upon herself to find and reunite Lana with her father in an effort to save him from execution. It’s not an easy task, as Lana has “worked overtime to lobotomize all memory of Vic,” and has largely succeeded.
The story is set in 2008, but Meidav bounces around in time, from Vic and Mary’s courtship, to Lana and Rose’s high school years to 2008 and all points in between, ping-ponging at a sometimes dizzying pace.
She subtitles the chapters with dates, even with the exact time in a contrivance that lends a sense of urgency to Vic’s looming execution. Meidav offers up pieces of each character’s life as if they are random pieces of a puzzle jumbled by the time travel and haphazardly tossed to the reader.
Almost every time change also results in a narrator change. Meidav is so consistent that she appears to be stricken with what I will dub “Multiple Author Disorder,” or MAD, which is what I became as the narrator’s voice kept changing. A lazy reader needs a consistent voice to maintain the narrator’s credibility. When the voice changes, is it the same narrator or someone different? It is third person (with a loose definition of third person) narration throughout, but the delivery constantly changes.
There is sometimes a staccato delivery and the use of incomplete sentences such as “once, daughter a little older, father gets sick.” At other times the prose reads like a poem, as with her description of people at a nudist colony: “sink of the tattooed and cockringed, of pierced or natural, Asian African Anglo Latino, bellies tight or multiple, breasts tiny or tripled, red brown yellow pink orange white, buttocks furry or denuded.” It’s frustrating at first, especially for a reader with conventional expectations.
But the result is a narrator with a situational voice, changing the delivery and vocabulary to match the circumstances, almost as if the narrator is acting out the story.
Like Lana’s parents, the narrator may well also be a college professor; there is a propensity for obscure words that left me with dictionary fatigue. Hebephrenic, revanchist, adipocere, frenulum, glottal unfrei, arbeit, and cenotaph (to name a few) all left me scratching my head. It appears elitist at times, but the vocabulary is not inappropriate given the situational narrator, and Mary and Vic’s status.
“Lola” is a nom de guerre befitting Lana and Rose. The song "Lola" is about a transvestite, someone who is not what she appears to be. It is the theme that ultimately defines the novel. Meidav uses the time jumping and changing narrator to string the reader along, slowly unveiling each character in what amounts to a striptease for the mind. The plot becomes almost a distant interest, perhaps even an annoyance, as the novel progresses; the real interest is in uncovering the true Lana, Rose, Vic, and Mary, none of whom are what they appear. The hope of any author is to evoke. Although frustrating at times, Meidav’s machinations succeed in a way that almost makes the reader a part of the story, even a lazy reader like me.