The Vacant Paradise
by
Victoria Patterson
Set in the 1990s, Newport Beach, CA, This Vacant Paradise explores a world where money is god. A man’s worth is judged by the size of his boat, the make of his car. A woman’s value is assessed by the blank perfection of her quantifiable desirability: dress size, cup size, the whiteness of her teeth. Dependent on her family’s wealth, Esther, the novel’s 33-year-old heroine, decides to marry into the Newport elite when an unlikely candidate thwarts her plans.
In the tradition of Edith Wharton and Henry James, Victoria Patterson shines a keen and often wickedly humorous light on our very American obsessions with class, race, age, and the roles of men and women in the strive toward upward mobility. The novel traces Esther's journey from a beautiful, yet deeply insecure woman, trapped by the ticking clock of her own desirability, to an awakened, independent individual, embarking on an alternate, unglamorous, and indefinable course. This Vacant Paradise is an honest examination of the difficulties of breaking out of the rigid value system laid upon us by society and family.
“Patterson’s unflinching account of the seedy side of a real-life Xanadu is frightening, immersive, and wonderfully realized.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Victoria Patterson’s Newport Beach is a privileged world of wealth and heedless consumption that trails a wake of human damage. By giving us nuanced portraits of the sidelined, she somehow evokes the complex, glittering whole. Patterson is our generation’s heir to John O’Hara and Edith Wharton. And nobody else writes about female sexuality with such sensitivity and fearlessness. Several times, I had to put this book down just to catch my breath.” —Michelle Huneven, author of Jamesland and Round Rock
Victoria Patterson is also the author of the story collection Drift, a Story Prize and California Book Award finalist and Best Books of 2009 selection by The San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in various publications and journals, including the Los Angeles Times, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Southern Review. She lives with her family in Southern California and teaches through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Riverside. For more info, please visit: http://www.victoriapatterson.net/
Victoria is a open to reviews, interviews, guest blogs, and a giveaway of This Vacant Paradise.
