'My Hollywood' - oh, my!

By Mona Simpson

Alfred A. Knopf. 384 pp. $26.95

Simpson's second novel, The Lost Father (1992), along with her third, A Regular Guy (1996), made similar use of an intentionally disorganized structure, allowing their protagonists to roam, digress, obsess, and repeat themselves while moving haplessly backward and forward along spiraling, tumultuous, and curiously suspenseful narratives.

The result was darkly charming. Readers, compelled to tag alongside the often irrational dreams, hopes, and delusions of Simpson's characters, were at once entertained and dismayed by their journeys.

A PEN/Faulkner Award nominee for her fourth novel, Off Keck Road (2000), and winner of a Whiting Award and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Simpson has set her latest in parts of Hollywood rarely visited by reporters from People magazine or camera crews from Lives of the Rich and Famous. Here, we find playgrounds and schools populated by ordinary, if upper-middle-class, families and their immigrant nannies.

Claire, a new mother whose husband writes with mixed success for television, struggles to balance her desire to raise their toddler, Will, and maintain a just-burgeoning career as a composer, working in a dreary upstairs office.

Their nanny, Lola, has left her large family in the Philippines in hopes of turning "a servant's wage into private school tuition for her own children," as Simpson has written about nannies in a New York Times op-ed.

Lola prides herself on her skills as impromptu matchmaker, modeling agent, marriage counselor, and sage. She confides:

"If you are smart, when something happens, if the baby takes his first step or says the first word, the first of Williamo was 'light,' second 'French,' third 'fries,' you keep in your private journal so you will have the true date but do not tell. You wait and that evening or the next they will call you shrieking, Lola, Lola come here!"

Lola also reveals her worries about the reluctance of Will's parents to address the toddler's inappropriate behavior: " . . . the hitting, that I really do not know. Claire, she is nervous. And the guy, he is not strong. . . . I am the one to explain: Williamo, that you cannot do."