Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick: A Novel of Separation

by Rachel Resnick

Book Overview

Dreaming of fame as a filmmaker, hungry for love and sex, Rebecca Roth heads out to Edge City, L.A., where her dreams mutate into nightmares. Hilarious, heart-blisteringly disastrous love affairs and degrading film jobs, encounters with stars and transients, a midget stunt-woman, and a sacrificial cow. With relentlessly cinematic, jarring, and alluring prose straight out of the Hollywood wasteland, Rachel Resnick captures the bleak scene of "glamorous"...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312263295
• ISBN13: 9780312263294
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Slap in the face!

Whether it properly portrays LA or not, this book is still f*cking amazing! I love how it is unlike any other book I've read and how it jumps from here to there. This girl can write!! Could not put it down!

Sexy, searing, honest to the bone

This novel feels so emotionally honest to me. It's violent but also vulnerable. It's drenched in a sense of place, a seething LA I've never seen elsewhere. The narrator, Rebecca Roth, is braver about revealing herself on the page than some people are on the therapist's couch. And I love the way Resnick swings from blunt to poetic & back. Here's Rebecca Roth, the narrator, on her latest Hollywood lackey job, in servitude to a director: "'You're my assistant, you're supposed to be thinking so hard about me you read my mind,' he hissed. My life as a slave, part whatever." And just a few pages later: "What I remember most about the abortion is the blue paper slippers...That papery rustle, shuffle, toward the abortion room and back. Barefoot in the cold metal stirrups. Riding and bucking toward death, sucked empty. Put them back on. Blue paper slippers." One reader compares Go West to a train wreck--well, yeah, if that means you can't tear your gaze off the page, even when it's 3 a.m. and you have to get up at 6. Damn, I love this book.

One Amazing F*cked Up Trip

The insight and creativity that Resnick displays in Go West... is radiant. She bends the standard structure of novel writing and grabs the reader with impressive hardnosed poetry and short stories. Resnick takes writing to a different lever, for artistic merit rather than jornalistic merit. She writes for the beauty of writing, not for the mere story-telling. Anyone that cannot recognize that is too shallow minded for the real world. This is an inventive novel with wonderful social observations.Resnick truly connects the reader with the heroine-and makes one damn good novel in doing so!

A fever dream, primal scream, electric kool-aid acid trip...

from the bowels of the glitter gulch. Brilliant, perceptive, hilarious, ranting, vicious and often painful trip through the candy-coated, black-lit landscape of Hollywood. Don't be misled - this isn't a "Hollywood" novel, but rather a stream-of-consciousness journey across the landcape, painting portaits of the things the rest of us notice but can't articulate: the soul of a dying cow, the beauty of a man shitting on the stoop of a trendy hotel, the ugly side of a movie star's soul... in a rich, fervent, tangled, prose... Rachel Resnick has the painfully observant razor sharp eye of a surgeon and the soul of a poet... i can't do this novel justice... read it yourself... the most painfully observant novel about LA since Day of the Locusts... I'm expecting great things to come...

A wonderful creative work that you wish would never end.

I was compelled to pick up this book because Aimee Bender, the author of "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt", thought it was "a fierce and powerful debut". Resnick's fresh approach reminded me of Bender, and Jen Banbury's look at L.A. in "Like a Hole in the Head". I happen to adore the work of Bender and Banbury and now I will add Resnick to my recent best fiction reads.