Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Catalina
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1983
WEBSITE: http://liskajacobs.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1983.
EDUCATION:University of California, Riverside, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections Library Assistant.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Hairpin, Rumpus, Millions, Literary Hub, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
SIDELIGHTS
Liska Jacobs has built a career for herself primarily within the literary world. She has penned numerous short stories and essays, which can be found in such periodicals as Hairpin and Rumpus.
Catalina serves as Jacobs’s introductory novel, and is meant to explore one of the messier sides of life. In an interview featured on the Electric Lit website, Jacobs explained that the novel was partly informed by her move to the city of Pasadena, and partly informed by the time she spent working with the Getty Research Institute. More specifically, while she grew comfortable enough with her job there to think it may have been a “forever” career, the reality turned out to be much different. She wanted her main character, Elsa, to go through a similar moment and have to deal with the transition and its aftermath.
At the start of the novel, Elsa has just lost a career that she was very happy with. She used to be employed under the MoMA, where she felt fulfilled and was even able to land a hot affair with her supervisor. However, her life is now shattered, and she’s looking to ease the pain however she possibly can. Elsa starts off by taking a personal trip to her old stomping grounds in Santa Monica. There she plans to indulge in hard drugs, hang out with friends, and revel in the chance to escape from her problems. However, things begin to change when her friend group suggests they all travel to Catalina Island. Elsa agrees to go, despite never having been particularly find of being on Catalina Island. Being there propels her toward a past she doesn’t want to dredge up, and further feeds into her desire to down a mixture of pills to keep her pain at bay. As the story progresses, it is revealed just how far back Elsa’s distress goes, and just how devastating the loss of her career is for her. She had turned her career into her identity, and with that gone, she is unsure of who she is. Indulging in wild behavior—promiscuous sex, copious amounts of pills and alcohol, and other reckless acts—serve as a comforting haze that Elsa gladly enshrouds herself with for most of the novel. She becomes determined to swim as far toward rock bottom as she possibly can. However, her behavior comes to affect not just her life, but the lives of those around her. Some of her friends are onto her, while others worsen her mental state. As the trip wears on, secrets are brought to light and relationships are stretched and strained. As Elsa continues on her dangerous path, time can only tell exactly where she will end up and just how far she will finally plunge.
Booklist reviewer Annie Bostrom called the book “propulsive, feminist psychological fiction from an author to watch.” A Publishers Weekly contributor expressed that the book is “a memorable character study.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews recommended the book “for those who appreciate the joys of a vicarious bender and the satisfaction of watching creepy people decompensate.” On the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Holiday Reinhorn commented: “It will be exciting to see which body of water Jacobs decides to sail on next.” Guy Savage, a writer for the His Futile Preoccupations blog, remarked: “I loved Catalina; it’s just the sort of book I am always looking for and find so rarely–people behaving badly within the rails of polite society.” BookPage contributor Stephenie Harrison wrote: “Rich with a prickling sense of menace, Catalina is an intoxicating psychological thriller that will set readers on edge from page one.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Catalina, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of Catalina.
Publishers Weekly, September 18, 2017, review of Catalina, p. 48.
ONLINE
BookPage, https://bookpage.com/ (November 7, 2017), “CATALINA: Coming undone—with a vengeance,” Stephenie Harrison, review of Catalina.
Electric Lit, https://electricliterature.com/ (November 9, 2017), Heather Scott Partington, “Liska Jacobs Knows a Hot Mess When She Sees One,” author interview.
His Futile Preoccupations ….., https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/ (December 2, 2017), Guy Savage, review of Catalina.
Liska Jacobs Website, http://liskajacobs.com (May 7, 2018), author profile.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (November 23, 2017), Holiday Reinhorn, “Dangerous Undercurrents: Sailing the Open Ocean of the Female Psyche in Catalina,” review of Catalina.
PaulSemel.com, http://paulsemel.com/ (November 8, 2017), Paul Semel, “Exclusive Interview: Catalina Author Liska Jacobs.”
About the Author
Liska Jacobs holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and The Hairpin, among other publications.
Catalina is her first novel.
Heather Scott Partington
Book critic, teacher. NBCC Emerging @bookcritics Fellow. Contributor to @electriclit, @goodreads Voice & @lasvegasweekly.
Nov 9, 2017
Liska Jacobs Knows a Hot Mess When She Sees One
The author of ‘Catalina’ on her favorite messed-up women, friendships, and romance
Photo by jasonwoodhead23 on flickr.
Get ready to know Liska Jacobs’s name. Her debut novel, Catalina — the first of two from MCD Books, FSG’s new experimental venture — is the kind of drunken, mascara-smeared bender that inspires thinkpieces, fandom, and heated arguments at cocktail parties. Jacobs’s heroine begins the novel on the edge of disaster, and she never looks back. Dumped by her married boss/boyfriend, Elsa snatches a purse full of pills and heads out to do some damage while she licks her wounds. Through the breakups of both friends and lovers, Jacobs explores the art world’s influence, the fantasy of southern California, and how we think about wanting.
Elsa’s voice has echoes of the strong, tragically beautiful protagonists of literature who’ve come before her, but Jacobs’s work stands alone, an insightful and sexy glimpse into the tragedies of aging and the misconceptions of youth. Jacobs and I caught up over email recently about self-destructive characters trapped in their messy identities, and the most enthralling fuck ups in literature.
Heather Scott Partington: You have done such a beautiful job weaving art and museum work into the narrative. What do you remember most about your time at The Getty? What do you think most people would be surprised to know about that world?
Liska Jacobs: Thank you! I worked at the Getty Research Institute as a Special Collections Library Assistant for five years, beginning as a work-study student while finishing up my undergraduate degree. I was very lucky, this was in 2008, right at the beginning of the recession.
The Getty is such a gorgeous place, perched up on a hill, overlooking West Los Angeles and the 405. What I remember most was that on a clear day you could see the sun reflecting on the swells in the Santa Monica Bay — you could see Catalina too. But because it’s so removed I also remember a feeling of isolation, of loneliness. It’s where I first realized that when you look at something beautiful, a distance is created between what it is you’re viewing and yourself. In Catalina, Elsa is a lot like the Getty, or one of the art pieces in the galleries. She’s beautiful and that makes her something to look at, something to project onto, but also makes her very alone.
What I eventually found to be surprising was that working at the Getty was a job like any other. When I started there I was very young, I thought the Getty was going to be it for me. A place I could work until retiring — just surrounded by art and beauty and like-minded people. But the reality was timecards, and sick days, and cutbacks, and end of month reports. It was important in Catalina to show Elsa coming to terms with that same kind of disillusionment — that fantasy never quite matches the reality.
HSP: What was it about Catalina that made you want to set your novel there?
LJ: Today it was triple digits in Pasadena, where I live, so I retreated to the west side. I’m working from the LMU library, which is on a hill facing the bay and the mountains. I can see Catalina from here. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been able to make out that island from somewhere in Los Angeles. It’s always there, on the horizon, this funny little lump of land just off the coast. Half of it is this classic California tourist trap, selling the idea of “paradise,” and the other half is this rugged natural landscape.
You really can’t ask for a better setting than one that can reflect that kind of duality, and the tension created by it.
I felt like it was this perfect compact version of Los Angeles. At the heart of the city you have Hollywood, which perpetuates this fantasy world, how relationships should be, what we should want, and surrounding us is the Santa Monica Mountains, the Los Angeles National Forest, and the Santa Monica Bay — the real Southern California. In the book, you have a group of friends who haven’t seen each other in five years. They’re all different people now, they have contrasting wants and needs — but they’re still pretending nothing has changed. You really can’t ask for a better setting than one that can reflect that kind of duality, and the tension created by it.
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HSP: Elsa follows a long tradition of protagonists who make bad decisions, and she’s a beautiful mess. Who are your favorite literary fuckups?
LJ: Such a great question. My favorite literary fuckups have to be Joan Didion’s Maria Wyeth, Elena Ferrante’s Olga, and Deborah Levy’s Kitty Finch. Oh! And of course Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood.
But I’m probably most influenced by Jean Rhys’s protagonists. Specifically, for this book, Sasha Jensen in Good Morning Midnight. Like Sasha, Elsa is self-destructive and spiraling. When I first started writing Catalina I thought maybe I would do an updated version of Sasha’s story. I had thought times have changed, Elsa could have a happy ending, or at least a liberating moment. But as I wrote and rewrote the ending I had to accept that female characters like Elsa, like Sasha — women who are pissed off and calamitous, who are labeled “unlikeable” — get punished. Maybe it’s a societal or cultural thing, I don’t know. But it was a pretty depressing realization. I mean Good Morning Midnight came out in 1939, and nothing’s changed? Women still don’t have the luxury to fuck up, there’s no girls will be girls for us. What a bummer.
I had to accept that female characters like Elsa, like Sasha — women who are pissed off and calamitous, who are labeled “unlikeable” — get punished.
HSP: Elsa hits rock bottom early, and then spends some time down there. How did you keep narrative tension when a character began the story at such a desperate point? How did you maintain a sense of forward propulsion?
LJ: Ha! You’re right. From the first sentence Elsa is ordering up a pitcher of Bloody Marys just for herself, and it doesn’t take long for her to start popping pills. Part of it is knowing nothing good can come from this — someone drinking and doing drugs and having sex will have to hit rock bottom.
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But that’s only a fraction of the tension. It really comes down to the other characters. There’s history between Elsa and all of them. With Charly, they’re old friends — best friends — and upon reconnecting Elsa almost immediately sees a crack in Charly’s perfect world. Same with Robby, who is Elsa’s ex-husband. That word is so charged in and of itself. Then add in his new girlfriend Jane, who’s a fitness fanatic and know-it-all, and smiles a bit too much at Tom (the new factor in the “old-friends” equation) — and it becomes a powder keg. Elsa is on a private bender, and she will inevitably be the spark. I think it’s sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You can’t look away.
HSP: Catalina captures the push-pull of young marriage, and the way that young relationships don’t necessarily grow with us. Elsa tells herself, “Drink and be content. This can be enough for you, too… Give it time, just wait.” Can you talk about how you worked this into Catalina? How it shaped Elsa?
LJ: Poor Elsa and Robby. They really aren’t suited. In many ways the roles we have for men are just as unfair as the ones we give women. Robby, who thinks of himself as a savior, a good guy, sees Elsa and fits her into the box of damsel. But Elsa is no damsel (or she sure as hell will not let anyone treat her as one). It’s a recipe for disaster! For them both. When we’re young we try on certain identities as a way of finding ourselves. It puts any relationships — romantic or otherwise — in peril from the start. And it’s hard to write that kind of truth without bleeding into melodrama, or to be tempted into clichés.
When we’re young we try on certain identities as a way of finding ourselves. It puts any relationships — romantic or otherwise — in peril from the start.
Really, Catalina came about because of Elsa. I wanted to write a female character who was pissed off and disillusioned. After leaving the Getty I sat down and her voice sort of tumbled out. I kept writing to find out why she was hurting.
HSP: It’s not just romantic relationships from Elsa’s past that needle her. Catalina is one of the more frank examinations of female friendship, of the way we can outgrow each other and change without knowing what to do. Elsa says, “I think over our friendship. Back in the beginning, in those dusty orchard days, I’d swear we were on the same page…” What drew you to exploring these relationships and breakups?
LJ: Recently I was talking with a friend about why some break-ups hurt more than others, and we agreed that when someone teaches you something they sort of become part of your identity, which makes it a much harder break-up. This is what’s happening with Elsa, she’s reeling after an affair ends with her boss, Eric, who is an intellectual and well-known curator. He’s really gotten under her skin.
And this is where female friendships come in: they start under the skin, and only go deeper from there. Which makes them such dangerous and precious things. When they go wrong they are profoundly painful, and writing about it requires a tremendous amount of honesty, mostly about yourself. I have a twin sister and a little sister, and we’re close. But if you look at the span of our relationship there are dark spots that all three of us pretend aren’t there. I think we’re starting to see more realistic portrayals of female friendship — Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels come to mind. Hopefully we’ll see more.
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HSP: Catalina switches point of view several times, which has the effect of Elsa seeing outside of herself. When she writes of her proposal, the propulsion toward marriage, she says, “You’re in the passenger seat and there’s traffic and he slips the ring on your finger and you betray yourself. You say yes, believing you love him because you want to love him.” Can you talk a little bit about your approach to point of view and narration?
LJ: I’m so glad you asked this. Elsa is going through an identity crisis. It’s why she gives a false name to the hotel bellboy Rex, why she gives another to the television producer Rafa — and why she can imagine that there’s a version of herself still in New York.
But her crisis is also about memory, which works two-fold. Elsa will replay a memory and judge what she said or did, or if the memory is painful it’s easier for her to put distance between herself and the incident. It’s something I think we all do. So in Catalina, Elsa slips into second-person when she’s uncomfortable, but also because she’s searching for the true version of herself. Is she unlikeable? Is she a whore? Is she at fault, or the victim? Because this is a first-person and a voice-driven novel, I thought it was important to have this reflected in the writing. I also think memory is murky at best, somewhere between truth and fiction, and switching to second-person blurred that line even more.
I also think memory is murky at best, somewhere between truth and fiction.
HSP: My favorite line in the novel comes at the end of a sad story Tom shares, and he says, “That’s just how it is, baby… The worst kind of want is to survive, and we all have that.” What does this mean to you?
LJ: In Catalina all the characters want things. Really it’s a whole book about wanting. What I think Tom is saying is that the worst kind of want is the kind that makes us stay in impossible situations. I don’t know if it’s cultural or a human thing, but we always want more and are willing to give up so many things to get it.
Charly and Jared, Robby and Jane, and Tom too — they were all there from the beginning. It was important that none of them feel like the villain or the classic foil character. What I wanted to do was write a story where the tragedy wasn’t just because of one person’s actions — each one of them is trapped by the identity they’re ascribing to, and what they think they want.
HSP: Was this novel something you workshopped during your time at UC Riverside’s MFA? If so, how did you retain so much of your own voice and perspective? This novel doesn’t feel over-workshopped.
LJ: I’m so glad you think so! I came into the UCRPD program with Catalina as a novella, and showed it to Mary Otis in my first workshop. I hadn’t shown it to anyone up until then, and honestly if she had said there was nothing there I would have been so discouraged I would probably have chucked it. That’s something I really appreciate about the UCRPD program, every single professor I worked with treated me and my work with respect. When you have that kind of support as a writer you can really cut loose. I felt I could push Elsa and the other characters further and further, eventually fleshing out the novel. I owe that program a hell of a lot.
I think part of the reason I was able to retain my voice is because the story is so voice-driven. I know who Elsa is, what she would and wouldn’t do, and I know the other characters just as well. Half the fun was getting all them into a room and seeing what happened. It’s probably why I stuck them on a boat!
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HSP: Catalina is the first in a series, correct? Can you talk about how it’s been different to write the second book? Is that something you’ve started already?
LJ: I think the main difference is time. With this next book there are set deadlines which I’m required to meet, but I think that actually energizes me. It helps that I’m really excited about this next book. I’ve even managed to bang out a first draft!
With Catalina I had all the time in the world. From novella to when Catalina comes out Nov 7th, it will have been five years. This next book isn’t a sequel per se, but I think anyone who loves Catalina will love it too.
HSP: What’s the best thing you’ve read lately?
LJ: Oh, this is a tough one. I’ve been reading a lot, mostly for essays and lists to accompany the publication of Catalina. How about I name two? I was floored by Richard Lange’s short story collection Dead Boys. He hits the right note between hardboiled Los Angeles and real human truth. And Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin, which I think should be a California classic. Her descriptions of traveling the length of the state are understated and gorgeous.
OVEMBER 8, 2017
Exclusive Interview: Catalina Author Liska Jacobs
Writer Mortimer Smith, Jr. once said, “All writing is [autobiographical], in my opinion.” But in trading emails with author Liska Jacobs about her debut novel Catalina (paperback, Kindle), she noted that while she does have some connections to her book’s protagonist, she’s not as much of a “beautiful mess” as our hero.
Lisa Jacobs Catalina
To begin, what is Catalina about?
I’ll give you the elevator pitch. It’s been awhile, let’s see if I can still do it: Catalina centers around Elsa, a woman in her early thirties who’s lost her job at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City. She comes back to Los Angeles where she regroups with an old group of friends — which includes her best friend and ex-husband — and they set sail for Catalina Island where there’s lots of drugs and sex and alcohol and everything spins out of control.
Phew. Still got it!
Where did you get the original idea for it, and how different is the finished book from that initial concept?
Well, after I left the Getty Research Institute, where I had been working as a Special Collections Library Assistant for five years, I sat down and Elsa’s voice sort of came tumbling out of me.
Let me back up. I started at the G.R.I. right out of school. I was young and enthusiastic and thought The Getty was the most beautiful place in the world, filled with art, and such exciting energy. But of course, a job is just a job, and after five years I left pretty disillusioned. So I knew I wanted Elsa to at the very least start at that level of embitterment.
It’s actually pretty close to the initial concept. I would say the only big difference is Elsa is fleshed out more. Originally, I wrote it as a novella, and then went back and built it out. I wanted to know about her, why she was hurting, why she was coping the way that she was.
So how often, after telling your friends what Catalina was about, did they ask you, “It’s about you, right? You’re supposed to be Elsa? Honey, if you need help, I’m here for you.”?
Ha! I think most of my friends — and family, too — know Elsa is not me. Or if they don’t, let this be a PSA: I am not Elsa!
But in all seriousness, Catalina is chockfull of my own observations about my generation, how I see Los Angeles, relationships, womanhood…. There is a certain amount of personal truth in it. I think it’s that way in any novel though. We write fiction to get to a truth, right?
Yeah. But are you now thinking you need better friends?
Ha! No, my friends are wonderful. It’s unfortunate when people confuse you with your work. It’s probably my own fault. Until this novel I had primarily only published essays, so I can see how the line is blurred.
Now, Catalina is your first novel, but you’ve written short stories before. You kind of already touched on this, but did you sit down to write this story, and in doing so realize it needed to be a novel, or did you sit down to write a novel, and this is the story you came up with?
Almost simultaneously with finding Elsa’s voice I developed her friends, too. Her best friend Charly and her husband Jared, Elsa’s ex-husband Robby and his new girlfriend Jane, and the wealthy interloper Tom — they were all there from the beginning. With that kind of crew — plus knowing I wanted half the action to be on the mainland, half on the island — I had a pretty good idea a short story couldn’t contain it all.
So what was it about this story that you felt needed to be a novel, as opposed to a short story? Or even a novella?
That’s a good question, because even with a big cast of characters I probably could have written a Fitzgerald style short story and been done with it. I think it was Elsa: who she is, why she acts the way she does. I think a lot of women are like her: smart, hurting, and angry about what the world has to offer them. And that woman deserved a novel.
Are there any writers, or specific novels, that you feel had a big impact on Catalina?
Oh, yes. Elsa comes from a long line of literary fuck-ups. A friend called them “beautiful messes,” and I think that’s a perfect description. [Joan] Didion’s Maria Wyeth [Play It As It Lays], [Sylvia] Plath’s Esther Greenwood [The Bell Jar], Anais Nin’s Sabina [A Spy In The House Of Love], just to name a few. All of them are hurting and pissed off and spiraling.
But I think Jean Rhys is probably my biggest influence. Really any of her protagonists, but Catalina owes a lot to Good Morning Midnight. In it, Sasha arrives in Paris after a long period away and proceeds to drink her pain away, trying — and failing —to make human connections.
It’s funny, when I started writing Catalina, I wanted to do sort of an updated re-telling of the “beautiful mess” character. I mean Rhys and Didion and Plath and Nin — that was a long time ago. Times have changed, I thought. I wanted to believe a woman could fuck up and not be punished. But what I realized as I wrote and rewrote the ending was women still don’t have that luxury. There is no “girls will be girls,” and there’s a price for misbehaving.
What about non-literary influences like movies or TV shows? Did any of those have an influence on Catalina, in terms of both what you wrote about and how you wrote it?
I’m an L.A. native, and I come from a post-production family, so I’m sure cinema influences how I write, but I don’t think there’s any one movie or TV show.
Music played a large role though. There’s one song I listened to every time I sat down to write Catalina: Grizzly Bear and Feist’s “Service Bell” [from the album Dark Was The Night]. I felt it captured Elsa’s headspace: all the rage and sex and drugs. I also had an array of albums I’d listen too while writing — The National, Phantogram, The Antlers, Emily Wells, Blur — plus a few movie soundtracks, too. Like the ones for Marie Antoinette and The Guest. It’s a pretty eclectic and moody playlist.
Catalina has been compared to Bret Easton Ellis [Less Than Zero] and Patricia Highsmith [Strangers On A Train], while Gina Frangello [A Life In Men] said it was like, “…a love child of Joan Didion and Kate Braverman [Lithium For Medea].” But do you think people who’ve enjoyed novels by Ellis, Highsmith, Didion, and Braverman — and not just the ones I mentioned — would enjoy Catalina?
I’m still floored that those are my comparisons. I think yes, if you like their writing, you’ll probably like mine. But it’s tricky, you know? We want to label things to make it easier: if you like X than you’ll like Y. When I’m not sure it’s that simple. Each of one of those writers you mentioned has such a distinct voice. There’s no mistaking Didion with Highsmith, or Ellis with Braverman, or vice versa. It makes me a little a worried. I mean, if I want Apple Pan but get In-N-Out because someone says it’s just as good, what are the chances I’ll be disappointed?
None because while Apple Pan is better than In-N-Out, it’s still a good burger. Though I prefer Golden State on Fairfax. But I digress. So has there been any interesting in turning Catalina into a movie or a TV show?
There has been interest for both film and TV. But nothing to announce just yet…
If Catalina was to be adapted into a movie or show, who would you like to see them cast as Elsa, Charlotte, and the rest?
I love this question, because I’ve given it a lot of thought. All the ages are off, but this fantasy! Ready?
Hit me.
Elsa: I always imagined Kirsten Dunst. But Emma Stone or Margot Robbie could do it, too.
Charly: Michelle Williams or Ginnifer Goodwin.
Jane: Zoe Saldana or Jessica Biel.
Jared: James Franco or Chris Pratt.
Robby: Joseph Gordon Levitt or John Cho.
Tom: Alexander Skarsgard or I think [James] Franco could pull this one off too.
Lisa Jacobs Catalina
Good list. Finally, if someone enjoys Catalina, what would you suggest they read next, and why that?
I love Maritta Wolff’s Sudden Rain, which I recently got to reread. It follows different women across the city as they drink and smoke and navigate love and relationships. It takes place in the 1970s, so there’s this feeling of just-beginning nihilism; of a city on the brink of change.
Or, if you’re looking for more hard-boiled literature: Richard Lange’s Dead Boys. It hits that sweet spot between fiction and human truth.
Catalina
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p21.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Catalina. By Liska Jacobs. Nov. 2017.350p. Farrar/MCD, paper, $15 (97803741197511.
A woman's dark inner cyclone is set against the intoxicating sunshine of Southern California in Jacobs'
stylish debut. Back in New York, before she got fired from her job at MoMA, narrator Elsas sun was the
brilliant, sexy, married boss she'd been sleeping with. She's fled to Santa Monica under the guise of seeing
college friends, her ex-husband among them, with clear plans to use booze, the stash of pills she stole from
her mom, and the carefree attitude her old friends expect from her to dispel any possibility of truth-telling.
The gang heads to Catalina Island, a place Elsa still has bad memories of visiting as a kid. From the shapes
and colors of Elsas pills--she's mixed them all together, because who cares--to her setting's manufactured
interiors and devastatingly beautiful, natural exteriors, Jacobs shines Elsas world to a high gloss. As readers
come to learn all that Eisa, a smart and charming antihero, isn't telling her friends and why, her crew takes
on a new light, too. Propulsive, feminist psychological fiction from an author to watch.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Catalina." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 21. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776087/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f4b2abe8.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776087
4/22/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524433915267 2/3
Catalina
Publishers Weekly.
264.38 (Sept. 18, 2017): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Catalina
Liska Jacobs. MCD, $15 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-374-11975-1
Jacobs's bold debut novel opens as 30something Elsa is fired from her executive assistant job at MoMA
(where she was also having an affair with her boss). Shortly after, she returns home to California, jaded and
angry, where she lives recklessly, self-medicating with a variety of pills stolen from her mother and
engaging in casual sex before she and her friends board a boat for a weekend reunion in Catalina. Within
the group are Elsa's ex-husband, Robby; his girlfriend, Jane; Elsa's childhood best friend, Charlotte;
Charlotte's flirtatious husband, ad man Jared; and Tom, one of Jared's clients, who lives to provoke,
needling Elsa throughout the trip and feeding into her hedonistic desires. Elsa is using substances during the
majority of the book, but her devastating physical and emotional tailspin and the group's exploits are
tempered by Elsa's memories of her past. These moments soften her character and add context to her
destructive ways, shaping the book into a memorable character study. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Catalina." Publishers Weekly, 18 Sept. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523623313/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=25f4b5ab.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523623313
4/22/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Jacobs, Liska: CATALINA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017):
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Full Text:
Jacobs, Liska CATALINA MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $15.00 11, 7 ISBN: 978-0-374-
11975-1
A reckless, self-destructive young woman returns home to sunny Southern California after being cut loose
by the boss she's sleeping with.Meet Elsa (also Susanna and Ingrid, depending on which one-night stand
she's introducing herself to), a beautiful loser on a dangerous tear. "It's just past breakfast so I order up a
pitcher of Bloody Marys and a bagel....I shower with my drink and take one of Mother's Vicodins. Let it
begin, I think, rolling myself into one of the hotel bathrobes, the fabric soft and vibrantly white,
wonderfully impersonal. Let it begin." Elsa was given a cushy severance package when she was let go by
the Museum of Modern Art, where she had been having an affair with her boss, a top curator, for two years,
since the night he learned his son had been killed in Afghanistan. Nice. Now she's flown to Bakersfield,
stolen all her mother's medications, and is holed up in a swanky hotel in Los Angeles while she reconnects
with her old posse, from whom she's concealing the real reason for her "vacation." The group includes her
ex-husband, Robby, and his buff new girlfriend, Jane; her childhood best friend, Charly, and husband Jared,
on shaky ground due to Jared's roving eye and their difficulty conceiving a child; and a new member of the
group, Tom, a slimy work associate of the men whose appeal lies primarily in his yacht. Off they all sail to
the island of Catalina, where the lying, drinking, and pill-popping escalate to no good end. The narrative
tone of Jacobs' debut echoes the numbed nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis' early work, and her protagonist is
just as lovely a person as his infamous characters. For those who appreciate the joys of a vicarious bender
and the satisfaction of watching creepy people decompensate.
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"Jacobs, Liska: CATALINA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192299/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3ebdbdfd.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192299
IT WOULD BE a literary crime to give away too much about Liska Jacobs’s mesmerizing debut novel, Catalina. What happens over the course of these disquieting 240 pages is almost less important than the deeper questions the story investigates about the “terrible business” of having been born female, the vicissitudes of female desire, and, ultimately, how women choose to live. An accomplished short story writer, essayist, and native Californian, Jacobs deftly takes the plunge into the longer narrative format and surfaces with a complicated and often vicious take on internalized misogyny that explores, among other female pathologies, the intricate ways women cover up their childhood damage and the radical ways they expose their own fears.
At its heart, the book is a chilling odyssey of addictive descent that takes its cues from the lounge-chair depravity of Eve Babitz, the drug-addled bathwaters of Kate Braverman, and the icy despair of Joan Didion. If you are someone who likes your female narrators to have shark’s teeth (as I do) and to leave a trail of blood in the water, Catalina delivers plenty of uncomfortable things to digest.
The book opens with 32-year-old Elsa ordering a pitcher of bloody marys for breakfast in the five-star Santa Monica hotel where she has barricaded herself, Leaving Las Vegas–style, and sits wrapped in a poisoned womb of a “vibrantly white, wonderfully impersonal” hotel bathrobe.
“Let it begin,” Elsa whispers, and with a shoulder bag stuffed full of stolen opioids and anti-anxiety meds she summarily sets off on a frightening path of self-destruction that she barely seems to recognize as her own. Elsa, we come to learn, is in free fall, having fled New York City in disgrace with a generous severance package after being fired for seducing and genuinely falling in love with her married employer, a powerful curator at MoMA. The prodigal daughter of a divorced beauty salon owner from Bakersfield, Elsa, whose dangerous inclinations border on sociopathy, “climbed out” and reinvented herself as a member of Manhattan’s high-art elite. But now she has returned home to the “identity failure” that Southern California represents, believing that New York City is a “predator” that “had turned on [her].”
With no options and no idea what to do, she “takes pills to quiet the world,” plays in the sand with the children of strangers, and haphazardly procures anonymous sex under false names at neighboring hotels.
Grief-stricken, bereft, and bouncing off the walls, Elsa rejoins a crew of spiritually bankrupt old friends she knew at UCLA to take a sailing trip to Catalina Island in a misbegotten attempt to rekindle lost connections. The mutinous crew includes Elsa’s mooning ex-husband Robby; her oldest and best childhood friend Charly, who regardless of Elsa’s serial mistreatment of her over the years has remained “loyal to a fault, like a good soldier or a dog”; Charly’s boorish, alcoholic husband Jared; and Jared’s new friend Tom, the owner of the 52-foot sailboat and heir to a potato-chip fortune who sets his pernicious sights more on Elsa’s misery than on Elsa herself. “My first wife took pills,” Tom informs her the first time they are alone together. “[She was] hot as shit, but absolutely bonkers. […] She was a pill popper too — don’t think I haven’t noticed. I can hear them rattling around in your purse.”
The group lands on the unpopulated side of Catalina at Paradise Cove, but like most Angelenos hungry to experience a wilderness they barely change into their bathing suits before heading off to the artificial sands of Avalon Harbor, home of Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning and Charlie Chaplin’s storied affairs.
“We are KINGS,” Jared drunkenly screams off the prow of the boat at one point, before passing out. “KINGS!” But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. What is more palpable is that they are the incarnation of unchecked privilege, and the only way to see each other is to cause each other harm.
While the characters seem to be drowning in their own shallow puddles at the beginning of the book, the depth steadily becomes more alarming with each turned page. More than anything, Catalina contends with “the open ocean” of the female psyche: how mothers undermine and disempower their daughters, and how women can be dishonest and annihilating, not only to men and other women but also to themselves. “It’s eating at me, still,” Elsa says. “Being so close [to the Pacific], I can imagine the swells in tune with my own heartbeat, and how being out there would be like looking at my true self.”
One of the most hypnotic parts of Catalina is the shipwreck of secrets at its center, which, combined with the unreliability of Elsa’s own memories of what lies buried, set up an ending that I imagine Paul Bowles might approve of. Jacobs’s prose has the effect of a stingray’s poisonous barb: it enters easily but is difficult to remove. Her writing moves with the rush of whipping rapids, often without so much as an adjective to weigh it down.
“Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives,” writes Hillary Rodham Clinton in What Happened, her recent autopsy of the disastrous 2016 election. “So many of us have been threatened or harmed. […] It’s difficult to convey what all this violence does to us. It adds up in our hearts and our nervous systems.”
Nowhere is this truer than in Jacobs’s fiction, where “pain is beauty” and the greatest desire anyone can have is merely to survive. Dangerous undercurrents that operate just below the surface of all women’s lives rise quickly from the depths in this unsettling and very relevant first novel. Whether we want to see what is left floating there is another story. It will be exciting to see which body of water Jacobs decides to sail on next.
“Dazzle a man and you blind him.”
From a few pre-publication quotes, I had a feeling that I’d love Catalina, a debut novel from Liska Jacobs. What is so attractive, so alluring about Kamikaze Women–self-destructive women whose messy personal disasters surround them in a blurring cloud of detritus? These are women who simultaneously attract and repel–women whose lives crumble at the foundations as they careen, hopelessly, from one catastrophe to another.
The Kamikaze Woman in Catalina is our narrator Elsa, who washes back up in California after being ‘let-go’ from her job as personal assistant to MoMA’s curator, the very married Eric Reinhardt. Elsa and Eric had an affair, and we don’t know what went wrong, but the affair ends with Elsa being given a “generous compensation” package by Human Resources. We get, right away, that Elsa is being discarded and paid off, but Elsa, hard-as-nails, but also interestingly brittle, doesn’t quite ‘get’ the fact that she’s been summarily dumped.
Elsa begins to think that New York feels “predatory,” and so home to Bakersfield and her mother’s house, ostensibly to lick her wounds. But home doesn’t offer consolation:
Poor girl, the joke’s on you. You’re back. Your old life just waiting for you, like a second skin.
So Elsa escapes with a quick flight to LA and then it’s a short drive to Santa Monica. Elsa holes up in a luxury hotel, enrolling in a yoga course but going to the bar instead, dropping money even as she tries not to think about Eric from the blurriness of a cocktail of unknown drugs (stolen from her mother) and alcohol.
There are many bottles. Probably too many, I think. So I combine a few that look similar. Who cares? I definitely do not. After all. I’m doing what Eric suggested on that last day: Go Home. See your mother in Bakersfield. Be open to possibility. Fine, a blue one if the mood strikes, or maybe a white, or sea-foam green. So many possibilities.
The scenes at the hotel are marvellous. The sniffy disapproval of the waiters and other guests as Elsa polishes off bottle after bottle of alcohol, ordering up coke though room service, and the way she teases a Lancelot in bellboy clothing.
Instead I call room service and order another Bloody Mary, which, I tell myself, is basically a salad.
Finally, with numerous traumas and dramas played out, Elsa calls up her old friend Charly, who is married to Jared. Elsa expects her friend to be mired in domestic bliss, but it’s clear that there are problems between Charly and Jared. He makes cruel comments to his wife and keeps a lascivious eye on Elsa:
“Have you been working out?” he asks. I tell him the most exercise I get is lifting a wineglass to my mouth or opening a prescription bottle. This enthralls him.
Elsa’s ex-husband Robbie now works for Jared, and so before long, Elsa finds herself on a trip to Catalina to attend a jazz festival with Charly, Jared, Robbie, his new girlfriend Jane and millionaire boat owner, the very alpha male, Tom. Tom’s family own ” a potato chip company, real American money.”
He’s well groomed, scrubbed clean, and absolutely menacing.
Of course, this trip is a recipe for disaster. Charly’s marriage is unhappy, Jared is openly womanizing, Robbie still has the hots for his ex and Jane, a restaurant manager, is … well… on the tiresome side. “She’s always doing some marathon or on a new diet.” She’s “very animated. Her arms and hands wave as if she were an instructor worried about losing Robbie’s interest.” As for Tom, he says that Elsa, brought along on the Catalina trip as a date, reminds him of his first wife:
Hot as shit but absolutely bonkers.
Catalina is the provocative, unsettling story of one woman’s meltdown, but it’s also a story of a handful of people behaving badly. A novel of Bad Manners, if you will. Everyone thinks that wildly successful Elsa is back on an extended holiday, but Tom, who claims he can hear Elsa’s pills rattling in her bag, has Elsa’s number, and he delights in watching the trip implode as couples fight, friction escalates and lives collide.
The big question here is Elsa’s state before being dumped by Eric. There are elusive shards of the past tantalizingly submerged in the plot, and most of these float to the surface through Elsa’s memories of her marriage to Robbie. But this is a woman who doesn’t want to examine her life and her mistakes; she’s much prefer to blur the past, and the present, with alcohol and whatever pills she can dig out from the alarmingly diminishing supply which lurks at the bottom of her bag. I loved Catalina; it’s just the sort of book I am always looking for and find so rarely–people behaving badly within the rails of polite society.
I squint to try to make out where the pier should be, where the Miramar is, where the airport and Charly and Jared’s house should be. Bakersfield just north and inland-New York and Eric a few thousand miles beyond that. It’s there, I’m sure. I suddenly feel lightheaded. Strange. Like catching your reflection, that moment just before recognition, when you are a stranger to yourself.
California dreaming turns into a living nightmare in Liska Jacobs’ dark and electrifying debut novel, Catalina.
When Elsa Fisher is fired from her job as an assistant at MoMA (where she also just happened to be having an affair with her very married boss), she pushes the eject button on her crumbling life in New York and flees to her sunny Southern California home. There, she soon learns that the old adage “wherever you go, there you are” proves to be infuriatingly true: Despite the change in location and the self-medication via a constant stream of benzodiazepines (stolen from her mother) and copious amounts of alcohol (paid for with her rapidly dwindling severance package), Elsa can’t seem to fully escape her demons or permanently dull the pain of her present predicament. Instead, she decides to fully commit to her downward spiral, consequences be damned. Wondering just how far she can fall, Elsa embarks with a group of old friends on a hedonistic trip to Catalina island, where she discovers just how dark rock bottom can be and her self-destructive spree risks ruining more lives than just her own.
Rich with a prickling sense of menace, Catalina is an intoxicating psychological thriller that will set readers on edge from page one. As we follow our pill-popping antiheroine on her bad-behavior bender, Jacobs adeptly infuses the narrative with a mounting sense of unease and apprehension as Elsa’s barely contained rage and resentment becomes ever more apparent and her actions become increasingly erratic. It’s clear from the start that Catalina isn’t a fairy tale and there will be no happy ending, yet Elsa’s ultimate unraveling—as she is taken from breaking point to broken—still manages to feel astonishing and devastating. Although Elsa’s ultimate goal seems to be to numb her feelings, Jacobs has produced a book that achieves exactly the opposite: It provokes and perturbs, and will leave its readers incredibly unsettled.