conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled The Ruins of California about Inez, Inez's, Reed with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: With this eccentric coming-of-age story, the author (<I>My Last Movie Star</I>) offers an interesting, if emotionally distant, window into California culture of the 1970s as well as an almost clinical examination of one extended family. Inez Ruin is a girl caught between suburban Los Angeles, where she lives with her mother, Connie (a former dancer), and her working class grandmother Abuelita, and San Francisco, where her sports car-driving, guitar-playing computer scientist father, Paul, parades a series of beautiful girlfriends. This unconventional family also includes a rich paternal grandmother (an artist's model in her glory days) and an adored hippie surfer half-brother, Whitman. Though Inez's evolution from passive observer to active participant in her colorful world is the story's driving force, the novel lacks a substantive structure. the author describes Inez's world with reportorial precision, but the accumulation of detail doesn't always contribute to the narrative's momentum, giving the story a memoirish rather than a novelistic feel. By the end, however, the relationship between Inez and her father blossoms into the emotional center of this offbeat tale. <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Ruins of California
  Two things always signaled that she was suffering: stage makeup worn during the day and loudness. She'd act too happy, like something was hiding beneath all her giddiness, something dank and unaired way down. My mother laughed, and sometimes she couldn't stop. Over the summer it had gotten worse—the shrieking jollity, the nonstop hardy-har-har—and she was always slipping away to watch more bad news on TV, turning it off when I wandered into the den. When the television tube faded out, it made a weird vibrating sound that grew fainter and fainter, and then she would yell out, "That's enough of that!"
  Not listening was part of it. When she was upset, it seemed like a siren was blaring inside her head every few seconds and distracting her. She'd talk louder, over you. In June, after Bobby Kennedy was shot and that picture of him lying in a black pool of his own blood ran in a magazine (I looked at it for a very long time), it was as if a megaphone had attached itself to her mouth. She brayed. She bellowed. The walls of Abuelita's house shook with my mother's giddy remorse and hysteria. She would fake that everything was all right—her big trick—and then, putting me to bed one night, she broke down and whimpered, "What kind of world have I brought you into?"
  What kind of world? I stood in the parking lot at Burbank Airport and watched her unload my pink Samsonite suitcase from the trunk of the car and wasn't inclined to ask. It's probably not fair to say I was the passive type. But maybe I was. I was receptive and quiet. I stood around a lot—waiting for balls to be pitched, orders to be given, situations to arise. While I slept, things came together: My clothes were laid out on my bed, my white orthopedic shoes polished, and in the morning plates of food appeared on the table before me. I ate everything on them. Hard to imagine now, but I was almost fat in those days—thick arms and legs, a belly that swelled where my waist would someday appear. Not that I paid much attention. My traveling outfit could be boiled down to three haphazard moves: a thin purple windbreaker, blue knee socks, and a pair of my special white shoes, which Doug Daley, one of the dumber boys at school, had recently called "clodhoppers." I was wild about the purple windbreaker. As for my belly, or the clods (a cure for a duck waddle), in my mind I was arrestingly beautiful and really quite grown up.
  What kind of world? One of mystery and magic and endless possibilities for romance. My new pink Samsonite suitcase was packed with Coco, my deteriorating baby blanket, and everything else. Why, it was almost like I was running away.
  On board I was a small figure at the front of the plane, but I felt large and super noticeable, almost famous. The stewardess kept turning up—shooing away a tired guy in a business suit who sat down next to me. She fussed about my jumper, which wasn't worth fussing over, and she used a baby voice, the kind of voice that always put me on edge because nobody in my family spoke to me like that—nobody—and suddenly everything about the stewardess seemed completely fake and hammy. Her orange-and-pink Pacific Southwest Airlines uniform with the hot-air-balloon cap was ridiculous. The way she spoke into the airplane microphone was like a fake person on TV. Everybody knew how to lock and unlock seat belts, so why did she have to stand in the aisle with a set of them—little belts attached to nothing—and demonstrate fastening and unfastening?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: three more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Their eyes were closed. Everybody's eyes were closed. And heads lowered. My hair was hanging in my face like a waterfall of darkness and limp reeds.
  After about twenty or thirty minutes of prayer—an eternity—I walked the church elders to the front door with a promise that I'd be seeing them at the fellowship hall after the service on Sunday, a complete lie.
  Was she slipping into my bedroom to spy? I'd started wondering about that. The wallpaper was peeling off in one corner of the room, and there were marks next to the bed, slashes in blue ink, where I was counting something. By Christmas, just three months after Shelley Strelow appeared in my life, there were three dozen slashes on the wall. Did my mother see them? Did she assume they were some kind of accident with a ballpoint pen?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I made a harrumph sound. "You didn't deserve any of us," I said, grabbing a coffee and one of his experimental brioches to take down to my lair. "But that's life."
  Later, when I was tired of studying, I called Robbie's number in Provo—the number that Boo had given me two years before. "She doesn't live in this dorm anymore," a young girl's voice said. I recognized something familiar about the voice—a kindness, an openness, a willingness to help me. "Let's see if I can find her in the BYU directory," she said. There was a short pause. "Yep, here she is. Robyn Morrison. At Deseret Towers. She acted like I'd never dumped her, or replaced her with Shelley, or grown up too fast, or tried to throw my life away. "I'm so glad you called!" she cried out. "My gosh! You sound exactly the same."
  Flip Brophy, my agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, doesn't come to visit me anymore since I moved to the hinterlands, but I still love her. The Sinclairs and the Spiegels, along with Nora Gallagher, are new friends but have the grace and understanding of old ones.
  In addition to my immediate and extended family (of Sherrills, Boninis, Easons, Powerses, and Shallcrosses), I've been buoyed by various unofficial support groups, especially The Glams (Clara, Geraldine, Sally, Elsa), who make me laugh hard at lunch and express interest in my characters long after I've grown sick of them. I'd also like to acknowledge my debt to the Parlayers (Julie, Stebe, and U.U.), who remember the TV grid on Thursday nights in 1975 and who have taught me how to bet exacta boxes and wheels. And as always, without my cousin Leslee Sherrill in my life, where would I be?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about acted, missed.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I made a harrumph sound. "You didn't deserve any of us," I said, grabbing a coffee and one of his experimental brioches to take down to my lair. "But that's life. "
  Later, when I was tired of studying, I called Robbie's number in Provo—the number that Boo had given me two years before. "She doesn't live in this dorm anymore," a young girl's voice said. I recognized something familiar about the voice—a kindness, an openness, a willingness to help me. "Let's see if I can find her in the BYU directory," she said. There was a short pause. "Yep, here she is. Robyn Morrison. At Deseret Towers. "
  She acted like it was nothing, like she'd just missed me. She acted like I'd never dumped her, or replaced her with Shelley, or grown up too fast, or tried to throw my life away. "I'm so glad you called!" she cried out. "My gosh! You sound exactly the same. "
  Flip Brophy, my agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, doesn't come to visit me anymore since I moved to the hinterlands, but I still love her. The Sinclairs and the Spiegels, along with Nora Gallagher, are new friends but have the grace and understanding of old ones. 
  In addition to my immediate and extended family (of Sherrills, Boninis, Easons, Powerses, and Shallcrosses), I've been buoyed by various unofficial support groups, especially The Glams (Clara, Geraldine, Sally, Elsa), who make me laugh hard at lunch and express interest in my characters long after I've grown sick of them. I'd also like to acknowledge my debt to the Parlayers (Julie, Stebe, and U. U. ), who remember the TV grid on Thursday nights in 1975 and who have taught me how to bet exacta boxes and wheels. And as always, without my cousin Leslee Sherrill in my life, where would I be?