September 5, 2009
The stories of Lesley Dormen that make up the novel The Best Place to Be are lightweight and repetitive renditions of a New York story often told -- and told much better -- by other writers, including Grace Paley, Laurie Colwin, and Maggie Estep. The utter dependency of her main character and alter ego, Grace, although charming in the first instance, becomes old quickly, and then highly annoying: when in one of the final stories, Grace asks, "Do you think anyone our age has fun anymore?", my only response was "Not if they are reading about you."
Dormen's stories are too close to autobiography, and too far from original insight, lively humor, or deep-veined feeling; they are adroitly constructed but facile, and weak at the core, built as they are around neuroses acknowledged and hidden. Grace needs a kick in the
pants to grow up and stop whining but she prefers instead to bask in
her neuroses as proof of her individuality. Too bad that in New York there is little of the
individual in the flaunting of neuroses and that in these stories there is little of grace.
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