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(HarperCollins
1993 - Terry Karten, Editor)
A New York
Times Book Review Notable Book
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Jacket illustration:
Ó Eric
Fowler Jacket
design: Nancy Sabato
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After a brief stint as a widow,
and seven years of a bad second marriage to a "stingy rat,"
Mrs. Ida Terhune runs away from her native Baton Rouge, leaving
everything behind but her two small children, four large suitcases, and
her 1970 Chrysler New Yorker. She is bound for the raw and alien
world of Jersey City, where, her friend Betty Trombley assures her, Ida
can get a job, because even a dead German shepherd could find work in
the corrupt city government. As Betty describes her, Ida Terhune
is over-sheltered and sanctimonious -- the kind of woman who honks
punitively at people who commit minor traffic infractions.
Although she settles into a new life at Betty's Grand Street apartment,
Ida is horrified by Jersey City. Historic potholes deep enough to
drown a mule threaten her New Yorker; members of the city school board
are under investigation for extortion, bribery, and dispensing rotten
food to elementary schoolers; and Betty's landlord, Rupert Dixon,
refuses to do anything about the pool of sewer water flooding the
basement and has hired his son, Chicken, to terrorize the Grand Street
Tenants' Association. Although she would prefer to squirrel herself
away in her own world, Ida is drawn unwittingly into an escalating
conflict with Dixon, and into an unlikely association with Betty's
friend Mike Ribeiro, "a criminal lawyer in both senses of the
word." Eventually Ida finds herself at the center of a
notorious homicide trail, under circumstances that threaten her sense of
morality and decorum, and ultimately, her sense of self. Mike
Ribeiro, Betty, and the Grand Street tenants come to her aid, with comic
and heroic results.
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Reviews
The New York Times Book Review
(by Walter Sattertwait;):
"Ms. Sharp, unlike Ida, has a fine,
freewheeling sense of humor, and she provides her story with a terrific
troop of characters, all vibrant and quirky: brash Betty Trombley,
the towering, irreverent, quick-thinking, fast-talking reformed
tomboy; Mike Ribeiro, the slovenly yet dashing, cynical yet
romantic criminal lawyer; Angel Rodriquez, the proprietor of a
pest-removal service whose jacket pockets sport, with a slight nod to
Luis Bunuel, the words "exterminator Angel." And there
are Ida's two children, Skeet and Sherry, both beautifully drawn as
distinct individuals. Funny and shrewd and sensitive, they are as
far removed from the smug, wisecracking kids of television sitcoms as
Jersey City is from the moon. And of course, there's Jersey City itself,
its air stinking of fish and sewage, its gamy streets potholed, its
landlords wicked, its cops crooked, its politicians and judges warped by
greed and corruption. Ms. Sharp exploits these wonderful
possibilities, both comic and tragic, with skill, compassion and
zest. By the end of "Lost in Jersey City," Ida Terhune
has, thank good ness, begun a tentative move to self-knowledge -- or at
least to self-questioning, the parent of understanding and change.
Ms. Sharp, against all odds, has made us hope for this, and care that it
happens. Having set herself a task that is very nearly impossible,
she is to be congratulated for achieving it and very nearly
perfectly.
The
Los Angeles Times (by Christ
Goodrich):
"A
wonderful novel ...[ Sharp's] development of Ida's story is so
beautifully controlled, and her sympathy for human idiosyncrasy so deep,
that the book holds constant and agreeable surprises. Sharp does
here what Louis Malle does in so many of his films: She makes the
odd event seem inevitable, the natural effect of an unnatural occurrence
... Sharp tends toward the sly and amusing rather than the profound and
philosophical, making Lost in Jersey City that rare thing, a
comic novel of substance. [Virginia] Woolf, I suspect, would have
loved it -- and perhaps even even a little envious."
The Memphis Commercial Appeal (by
Frederic Koeppel):
"In case you hadn't
noticed, Jersey City is not Baton Rouge... That discrepancy, and Ida's
inflexibility are at the heart of Lost in Jersey City, Paula
Sharp's hilarious and touching second novel ... It's a pleasure to put
yourself in the hands of an author who cares enough about her book and
her readers to invest even her minor characters with humanity and
individuality."
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First
Page of Lost in Jersey City
If you
venture too far from home, life will wrestle you to the ground; it will
carry you off to troubling places you could not have imagined; it will
alter you, against your will, into a person whom you barely recognize,
into someone you would not even want to say hello to. This is what
Mrs. Terhune would have told you, had she been able to put her muddled
thoughts into so many words. When she allowed herself to consider,
even for a moment, what she was about to do, she experienced a panicky
feeling that she already had ceased to be herself.
"I can't believe you
talked me into this," Mrs. Terhune said, as her Chrysler New
Yorker, pale blue and monstrous, nosed onto the road.
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