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The God-Shaped Hole
Tiffanie DeBartolo, 2002
Sourcebooks
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781570719585
In Brief
Tired of the usual dating politics, Beatrice "Trixie" Jordan follows an impulse and replies to a personal ad: "If your intentions are pure, I'm seeking a friend for the end of the world." In doing so, she meets Jacob Grace, a charming young writer, a passionate seeker of life. Despite their jaded views of the world, they fall immediately in love.
Trixie and Jacob begin an emotionally charged and tumultuous affair; one they try desperately to keep sacred. As they struggle to carve out a future beyond the Los Angeles hills, Trixie and Jacob face family secrets that threaten to keep the two close to home...or at least apart from one another.
With brash humor and a bit of heartbreak, wry and vulnerable Trixie leads us through the joys and furies of her wrenching romance, leaving behind a raw vision of the love and loss of a lifetime. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—November 27, 1970
• Where—Youngstown, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California at Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Boulder, Colorado and New York City
Tiffanie DeBartolo is an American novelist and filmmaker. Her fiction includes The God-Shaped Hole and How To Kill A Rock Star, and one film credit, Dream for an Insomniac.
Born in Youngstown, Ohio, she attended the all-girls Villa Maria High School and dropped out her senior year when they wouldn't let her graduate early. She eventually went to college and moved to Los Angeles. She currently spends her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado. (From Wikipedia.)
Critics Say . . .
In the brief prelude to this conventional contemporary love story, a fortune-teller predicts that Beatrice Jordan (then 12) will meet a soul mate whom she'll lose to tragedy. Fifteen years later, lonely and feeling like an outsider in her hometown of Los Angeles, this self-professed "cynical but lovable...chick" impulsively answers a personal ad in a weekly newspaper. Jacob Grace is two years her senior, a freelancer with a novel called Hallelujah in progress; Beatrice's work as a jewelry designer gives her life meaning, as do music, books and sex, not necessarily in that order. Both of their fathers, hers a workaholic lawyer, his an alcoholic author decamped, and they still feel abandoned; they also both feel that music is "a cosmic language" and that people are "all searching to fill up" the titular hole in their souls. Jacob renames Beatrice "Trixie" and takes her for a midnight swim in the frigid Pacific before they bed down in her apartment. Their ensuing relationship is sensuous, but marred by her jealousy of his former girlfriend, his fondness for taking solo sojourns without notice and their shared antagonism toward their fathers. Beatrice comes across as bright but brittle, independent but superstitious, sophisticated but trailer-park profane. Jacob is Byronic, misunderstood and (of course) destined for tragedy. For readers compelled by bedroom athletics and the self-destructive tendencies of free spirits, and unopposed to prose that's not much better than competent, this first novel offers some appeal.
Publishers Weekly
Beatrice "Trixie" Jordan, a lonely, 27-year-old jewelry designer living in Los Angeles, responds to a personal ad from a man "seeking a friend for the end of the world." The man is Jacob Grace, a 30-year-old writer. They fall madly in love and believe they are soul mates. Abandoned by their fathers, they spend much of their time helping each other come to terms with their feelings. After enduring some emotionally desperate times, they hope better days are ahead and plan to leave L.A. and spend the rest of their lives together. However, when Beatrice was 12, a fortune-teller told her that her true love would die young. First-time novelist DeBartolo, writer and director of the film Dream for an Insomniac, has written an edgy story of love and fate rife with expletives and sex. This is a love story in which a happy ending isn't guaranteed. Some readers may be unfamiliar with some of the pop-culture references and may not appreciate the frank and brutally honest tone, but overall this is an engaging first novel. For public libraries. —Samantha J. Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY.
Library Journal
DeBartolo's screenwriting experience (Dream for an Insomniac) shows in her debut novel, a star-crossed romance in the hipper outreaches of Los Angeles. The first sentence tells the whole tale: "When I was twelve, a fortune-teller told me that my one true love would die young and leave me all alone." Beatrice Jordan was at a splashy Hollywood bash with her entertainment lawyer father when she heard that fortune. She is now your typical jaded and cynical twentysomething child of LA riches. She hasn't spoken to her father since he left the family, and she doesn't think so highly of her mother either. A designer of one-of-a-kind jewelry selling to places like Barney's, Beatrice proclaims her outsider status with great pride and no apparent sense of irony. She is also lonely, so she answers a personal ad (readers' responses to the book may be gauged by whether they find the ad charmingly deep or pretentiously dumb) that's been placed by one Jacob Grace. Jacob and Beatrice recognize quickly that they're soulmates: he's a romantic ideal-kind, witty, intense, and troubled by his father's abandonment when he was an infant. He and Trixie (that's what he calls her) make love a lot (graphically described), eat at wonderfully quirky restaurants, share their intellectual pretensions (much hip namedropping-Nick Drake, John Fante, etc.), and help each other come to terms with their fatherly pasts. The romance has rough patches, but it's true love, and, not so gradually, Jacob wears down Beatrice's cynical resistance to trusting him not to leave her the way her father did. When he sells his first novel, they plot their escape from Los Angeles. But all along Beatrice has had troubling dreams of Jacob being swallowed by a whirlpool, and, sure enough, with only 30 pages to go, tragedy strikes. DeBartolo's combination of one-liners and three-hankie tearjerking is skillful-and transparently manipulative. This generation's Love Story.
Kirkus Reviews
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