Layover is a novel by the American writer, Lisa Zeidner, first published in 1999 by Random House. It is one of New York Times''' Notable Books of the Year. The novel focuses on the theme of maternal grief.
A film adaptation of Layover was announced in 2016. As of May 2022, the film has not been released.
Description
After her young son is killed in a car accident and her husband, a surgeon, admits during sex to having had an affair, the protagonist Claire Newbold – a successful medical sales representative in her early forties – fails to return home from a business trip. She drifts, staying in hotel rooms without paying, obsessively swimming in their pools and becoming adept at evading both hotel security and her husband's calls. She starts to have sex with a series of strangers, including a youth in his late teens and his father, constructs lies in which her son is still alive, and begins to descend into madness. The novel is written in the first person, with a narrator who is not always reliable.
Writing and publicationLayover has been described by the author and literary agent Donald Maass as Zeidner's "breakout novel". It is her fourth novel, published a decade after her third; Zeidner spent five years writing it, stating that she wanted to create "a smart, middle-aged woman, a grownup". As in some of her other novels, including Customs (1981) and Love Bomb (2012), the protagonist is close to Zeidner's own age at the time of writing. Zeidner characterized the plot in 2016 as a "woman kind of losing her mind after the loss of her son" and her attempts to "find a way back to her marriage and to herself". She said that the book focuses on "how women lose it", and highlighted that "women keep better control of the things they have to do."
Despite the serious subject matter, Zeidner intended the novel to be "entertaining". She stated in a 2012 interview that "tragicomedy is what interests me" and that all her writing attempts to bring humor to bear on subjects that are usually straight-faced and earnest. I did that with my first novel, which was about a homeless person, and my second, which was about date rape, and have just kept it going, because I truly believe that there's truth in irony, in complexity of tone. She reported researching medical conditions that might underlie the protagonist's behavioral change, as well as how hotel security operates. The novel has been translated into several languages including Dutch, French, German and Hebrew.
Reviews and critical analysis
Reviewers Joanne Kaufman and Betsy Kline liken the novel to other fiction of the 1990s in which a woman leaves her life and family behind, including Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years (1995), Kathryn Harrison's Exposure (1993) and the short story "Crocodile Tears" by A. S. Byatt (anthologized in 1998). The novelist Karen Karbo, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, writes: With '"Layover," Zeidner joins the ranks of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon, all of whom have written in the women-spiraling-into-madness genre. But Claire is something new. Unlike would-be female nut cases from an earlier time, she doesn't set off on her journey needing to shuck her good-wife persona. She highlights the appropriateness of the name "Newbold", and considers that the novel "really begins to soar" after Claire seduces the teenager, adding: There are few aspects of a novel more compelling than watching the writer go out on a limb, wondering how dare she. Claire's odyssey of lust, seduction, desire, control ... never veers from what we think of as classic male acting out, which forces us to examine why we would more easily accept such behavior in a bereaved father than in a bereaved mother. The review focuses on the novel's treatment of grief, which Karbo describes as "wise and shrewd", and highlights the way in which Claire fails to grieve in an acceptable fashion.
Karbo praises the novel's handling of the sexuality of a woman in her forties, and highlights the fact that Claire's journey is not "a simple sexual one". The academics Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl quote this comment from Karbo, adding that the novel is about "a self in desperate need". They identify Claire as a "modern-day Erica Jong", and highlight the role of the hotel setting, which "facilitates transgressive feminine performance and female sexuality".