The Diamond Lane (2 page)

            
BOOKLIST

Karen Karbo is nothing if not funny, so you'll forgive her – no, you'll thank her – for not turning her chain- smoking father's death from lung cancer into a
Lifetime
movie weepfest. Instead, this bittersweet book honestly shows death to be what it is: a part of life, with all its annoyances, inequities, miseries and joys.

            
PEOPLE

Karbo's willingness to portray the tough business of grief and mortality in all its unmanageableness and confusion makes
The Stuff of Life
a book you want to keep reading, and laughing with, to the end.

            
THE SEATTLE TIMES

…The book works beautifully on many levels. A lively, insightful and astonishingly unsentimental read, it's intensely funny in places.

            
THE WASHINGTON POST

        
Motherhood Made A Man Out of Me

        
•
  
A
New York Times
Notable Book

Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me
should be clutched to the “corn-silo-sized” breasts of every new mother.

            
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Brilliant! The righteous, thoroughly American Karen Karbo delivers a swift kick in the kegels to those sappy
What to Expect When You're Expecting
moms in her funny and appallingly honest novel
Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me
.

            
VANITY FAIR

        
Trespassers Welcome Here

        
•
  
A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year

        
•
  
A
Village Voice
Top Ten Book of the Year

The Russians have come – and they're fascinating. Karbo's first novel, about Soviet émigrés in L.A., has passionate characters colliding in love, jealousy, politics, and the ongoing cold war between the sexes. An extraordinary debut that combines compassion with raucous comedy.

            
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Copyright © 2014 Karen Karbo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

“Paperback Writer” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney © 1966 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada and Mexico Controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. under license from ATV Music (MACLEN) All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Karbo, Karen

The diamond lane / Karen Karbo.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-99043-702-4

1.
  
Man-woman relationships – Fiction.

2.
  
Motion picture industry – Fiction.

3.
  
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) – Fiction.

I. Title.

PS
3561.
A
584
D
5 2014

813'.54–
DC
23

2013044757

9
  
8
  
7
  
6
  
5
  
4
  
3
  
2
  
1

Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

3rd Floor

Portland, Oregon 97212

hawthornebooks.com

Form
:

Adam McIsaac/Sibley House

Set in Paperback

Originally published in 1991 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York

First Hawthorne Edition, 2014

Dedicated to my dad, Richard Karbo, and the memory of my mom, Joan Karbo A toast and a wink to my fine editor, Stacy Creamer

ALSO BY KAREN KARBO

Non-fiction

Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman

How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great

The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir

Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club

My Foot is Too Big for the Glass Slipper
(with Gabrielle Reece)

Big Girl in the Middle
(with Gabrielle Reece)

Fiction

Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

Trespassers Welcome Here

For Young Adults

Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs

Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

Contents

Introduction

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Introduction

Jane Smiley

EARLY IN
THE DIAMOND LANE
, KAREN KARBO ARRIVES
at her subject (as opposed to her plot). Mimi FitzHenry, in her mid-thirties, works at a production company, where she reads scripts for a (small) living. Her sister, Mouse, is calling her collect from Africa, and she has to justify taking the call to her boss. She staves him off by telling him that her mother, Shirl, was hit in the head by a falling ceiling fan and needs surgery. Her boss says, “‘Where'd it happen?'

“‘Gateau on Melrose.'

“‘Good God, I ate there a couple weeks ago.' Solly seemed both baffled and repulsed. He had never heard such a thing. Wasn't bad luck and misery and brain surgery and estranged sisters the stuff of TV miniseries? How tasteless to drag them into real life.'”

But this is Hollywood, where real life and miniseries are only distinguishable by who is getting paid and how much. No one is more aware of this than Mimi, who embraces it, or Mouse, a year younger, who rejects it. How and why Mimi and Mouse are who they are and what will become of them when Mouse returns after sixteen years is the subject of Karbo's novel, which is hilarious, dark, playful, edgy, ephemeral, and enduring all at the same time.

The Diamond Lane
is Karbo's second novel, first published in 1991, two years after
Trespassers Welcome Here
, a novel about Soviet emigres to L.A. Karbo was thirty-three years old. There is
never a moment in The Diamond Lane where Karbo doesn't know just what she is talking about – the movie business, how to drive across town, what it is like in Africa, how to put together an absurdly expensive wedding, what love feels like, what doubt feels like, what bulimia feels like, what despair and sibling rivalry feel like. Of course, Mimi and Mouse have lovers. Mouse brings her English boyfriend, Tony, home with her, her collaborator in her current project, a documentary about an African tribal wedding. Mimi has a clandestine relationship with Ralph, a married man, who is teaching the class she is taking in “How to Write a Blockbuster.” Ralph has never written a blockbuster, but he has plenty of students. And then there is Ivan.

Karbo doles out measures of information with exquisite literary timing, weaving each new outrage (according to Mouse) or prize (according to Mimi) into her sour-sweet but always funny discourse. The reader comes to trust her completely – to wait patiently for the mystery to be solved because there will be so many sharp insights along the way. One of my favorites comes when Mouse is observing a friend of Mimi's reading scripts. Karbo writes, “Each one took about ten minutes. She read the first ten pages, the middle ten, the last ten. If she liked those thirty, she'd go back and read the first twenty, the middle twenty, and the last twenty. If she liked those sixty, she'd go back and read the first thirty, the middle thirty, the last thirty, which generally amounted to the entire script.” Carole, the enviable reader, would rather go to nursing school.

Karbo has a wonderful gift for populating her novel with amusing and revealing minor characters. There is Lisa, the sound editor: “She worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day syncing up footsteps, thwoking tennis balls, high school boys playing the edge of their desks with number 2 pencils, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. Every rat, every tat had to be there, and had to be in sync. Then, in the mix, the producer covered all of them with a song from the soundtrack album. It would have been a wonder if she wasn't addicted to Lithium.” One of my favorites
is Shirl's sister, Auntie Barb, who lives in Boring, Oregon, where she cultivates her sense of superiority. “Your eyeballs are drifting all over the place,” said Auntie Barb. “Everyone here does that. They pretend they're listening but all the while they're looking around for somebody more interesting. In Oregon people look you in the eye.”

When
The Diamond Lane
first came out, it was admired for its edgy style and hailed, for good reason, as “a deft, tragicomic social satire – of Los Angeles and the movie biz in particular and modern mores in general – noteworthy for the complexity of its characters, crisp prose, and loopy comic style.” (
Library Journal
) The
New York Times
loved it – declaring it one of the best novels of 1991: “A wonderfully comic novel about savvy Hollywood outsiders trying to get in—and to juggle their disastrous but funny love lives.” In the twenty-two years since publication, things have changed – or not. Filmmakers do not, perhaps, lug around the miles of celluloid and the burdensome cameras and sound recorders that they once did. Mobile phones ring all the time now, and perhaps Solly can reach his target-connections in New York more readily that he could then (perhaps not), but the convoluted relationships between art and commerce, truth and fiction, love and rivalry, wit and sadness that Karbo explores in
The Diamond Lane
have not changed. This novel still feels knowing and audacious and up-to-the-minute.