Stephanie Jones: Book Review - This One Is Mine By Maria Semple

This One is Mine, a trenchant satire of the wealthy – and trying to be – in Los Angeles, is shot through with Maria Semple’s powerful sense of the absurd, honed in part by her former life as a TV writer in what is perhaps, after Washington DC, the world’s most insular, self-obsessed company town.

When desperate housewife Violet, who gave up her own writing gig to have a family with rock-band manager David, drives past Twentieth Century Fox and envisions “writers in smelly rooms . . . slogging through rewrites, eating take-out, unbuttoning the top button of their pants”, it’s a description come by honestly. It also exemplifies the uncomfortable intimacy the author can forge in just a few lines.

Indeed, Semple thrusts the reader into the messy interior lives’ of the book’s inhabitants. In the sparkling opening scene, she forms an image of David as a bastion of sanity and order, resisting the chaos that threatens to engulf a luxurious home most often populated by himself and Violet, their small child, Dot, and a nanny referred to by the couple as LadyGo owing to her haphazard command of English.

Soon enough, however, Violet’s perspective is provided, and we see a woman paralyzed by her husband’s constant criticism and barely suppressed anger, with more money and time that she knows what to do with and a suffocating absence of purpose. By the time she meets a skint, recovering-addict bass player in the men’s room of a museum, the die is already cast.

Then there is David’s sister Sally, a woman with the drive Violet has lost. In a novel rife with freighted meetings, the scene in which Sally goes to a party and turns a blind date into a relationship at warp speed by seducing journalist Jeremy in the coat room is easily the funniest. After their brief encounter, Sally carefully adopts a “classic sexy pose, like those early shots of Marilyn Monroe, only Sally wasn’t so fat.”

Sally, in her mind, has no time to waste – having just turned 36 and tiring of teaching her patented workout, Ballet-de-Core, to the affluent (including three-year-old twins), she needs to land Jeremy just as he is on the verge of becoming rich and famous by graduating from print to a plum TV role. Jeremy presents a way out, if she plays everything just right, and if eliciting a proposal and staging a pregnancy is within her power and code of ethics. Semple can craft an entire personality in a couple of choice anecdotes, so it isn’t long before we understand that in the case of Sally, there is no ‘there’ there.

Semple has a subtle way of bringing her character’s backstories into focus, teasing information so that you are almost leaning into the page with eagerness. A memory of a childhood reading of Goodnight Moon illuminates the nature of Sally’s neurosis, while Violet’s inability to rebut David’s nitpicking might have to do with abandonment by her mother or life with her father, a “colourful and dissipated” figure who died while estranged from Violet.

This One is Mine has all the verve and panache of the late Churchill Grace, and beneath its wryness, much to say about how we distract ourselves from our need for love.