Book Review: Layover

Claire Newbold is a ghost in her own life. Her heart is ruinously wrung, its four chambers wracked by grief. She’s lost her small son, an only child, in a car crash. The spouse who could have been her source of healing — cardiothoracic surgeon Ken — has slept with a colleague to assuage his own pain. So, the heroine of Layover, Lisa Zeidner’s wry, whip-smart novel checks out of her everyday life and goes out on the lam, seeking sex to connect with strangers, sneaking into hotel rooms she’s not paid for, trying on assorted identities for size. If the book of Job had starred an unfettered, ferocious contemporary woman, an Erica Jong on acid, it would be Claire.

Zeidner, a professor of creative writing at Rutgers University, has certainly not won her critical acclaim from lullaby literature.

Outrageous yet sometimes tender tragi-comedy is her forte — a previous novel, Love Bomb, features an armed feminist gate-crashing a wedding for hostages. Zeidner takes fiction’s time-honoured themes of love, loss and the search for consolation and shakes them by the shoulders till they rattle. Here, grief is not a state for weeping acceptance. It is wild, clamorous and coloured by a deeply suppressed, off-kilter fury that Claire’s benevolent psychiatrist has probed but not yet fully processed.

She is, emotionally, way beyond fear: “After the accident I… could walk on nails, eat fire, explode or be garrotted — nothing would ever hurt as much again.”