Pamela: A Novel

by Pamela Lu

Fiction. "While the new sentence the prose wing of Language writing strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut, knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts the emergence of an 'I' (not 'P' and not 'Pamela, ' though the three characters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, with memories of a suburban childhood...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1891190040
• ISBN13: 9781891190049
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Atelos
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Took my breath away

In "Pamela: A Novel," Lu takes us into a realm that could be considered the anti-novel, as real characters are represented by mere characterizations, including the elusive Pamela herself represented by P and the main friends in P's life: L, R, YJ, C, and A. In fact, it's this very assurance of her own realness and the realness of others that P searches for throughout the events in this book, only to find that her and her friends aren't "here" or "there," and devise "numerous strategies to keep from going `there.'" When P along with friends AJ and YK visit her childhood suburbs in Southern California, they find themselves at the Anti-Mall: "one square block of alternative record and clothing shops, faux slacker murals, graffiti-stained walls, and lounge furniture imported from the 70's--only to find that it too was sponsored by a venture interested in profit." Partly an exploration of language and meaning, and partly a philosophical treatise on the deprivations of capitalism, this novel simply took my breath away. With heartening subtlety, Lu also sheds light on the complexities of growing up Asian American and non-heterosexual: "For it was never being sexual or being a minority or being a sexual minority that mattered in itself, but the various combinations thereof that produced confusion and triggered those politicized art-forms that repeated cliches of `displacement' and `diaspora.'" Like P at the book's closing, we find ourselves awaking from this "moment that technically never existed" with ourselves more intact than ever.

Proustian "new sentence" hits Bay Area postmodern streets...

Proustian "new sentence hits Bay Area streets in a novel called "Pamela" and the formations of space, time and subjectivity are irrevokably altered in this splendid book. Like Henry Adams, Lu is caught between one world dying and another world being born, and she is the cyborg maker of this mongrel syntax, part novel, part autobiography, cool, lyrical, perverse. It is a work of great abstraction and reverse specificity, creating the ethnoscape of silicon valley selfhood in a way that alters reading habits and creates the retro-fitted syntax of postmodern post-fordist subjectivity. It is a poem in motion towards the dismantlement of boredom: should be required reading for high school prodigies, Wheeler Hall savants, and shopping mall saints.

now which average reader would that be?

An excellent, curiously dreamy dis-average work about coming of age. Told in language. Seemed all to make beautiful sense to me.

It will stalk you

Though there are a number of ways to enter Pam Lu's crisply-written first book Pamela: A Novel, there is, perhaps, no way to escape it. Lyrical in both its intent and intensity, Lu's story swiftly takes its reader to the heart of a poetic ambivalence told through the figures of self, love, and art. The many intellectual turns that this novel takes are matched only by the unwavering interrogation of self that takes place between P, the novel¹s speaker, and her brilliantly aestheticized avatar, Pamela.