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In her
first attempt at fiction, Meghan Daum's The Quality of
Life Report trails Lucinda Trout, a 29-year-old lifestyle
correspondent for a New York-based television show (think
SNL's "Bronx Beat" meets The Devil Wears Prada). She leaves
unforgiving Manhattan for Prairie City, a typical Midwest
town, to tape a series of segments demonstrating that peaceful,
small town life is still alive and well in the American heartland.
While
Daum easily manages to grasp the nuances, or at least the
accepted maxims, of a lower Manhattan lifestyle (rodents,
food delivery, impossibly high rent), the scenery, characters,
and spiritually empty thoughts all come across like leftovers
from more popular narratives. Daum's book of essays, My
Misspent Youth, clearly shows that she doesn't need to
rely on caricatures. However, Trout's boss Faye Figaro is
a lightly dusted Miranda Priestly and her Prairie City boyfriend
Mason Clay is aesthetically Sex and the City's Aidan
Shaw with an unironic meth problem.
Prairie
City, a town located ambiguously in "USA," is the central
location that Trout visits, then relocates to, while filming
a segment on methamphetamine and its prominence among Midwestern
women. The problem for Trout, but one of the more genuine
aspects of the narrative, is that Trout assumes that the modest,
easy-going town is not only what her life is missing but the
central piece that will ultimately redeem the good person
buried within her.
What
The Quality of Life Report laboriously succeeds in
doing is proving that although Trout can run from Manhattan's
city limits, all the toil and trouble she has experienced
fails to prepare her for a life outside the delivery route.
Despite its heartland moniker, Prairie City is not the Oregon
Trail rest area Trout envisioned. After a year of infrequent
reporting on such topics as how to throw a barn dance and
Midwestern book clubs, Lucinda isn't stuck in Manhattan anymore.
Instead, she is stuck in a large cabin, living with a meth-addicted
boyfriend with three children, a menagerie of animals in the
back yard, and surrounded only by Prairie City denizens whom
she routinely exploits for the sake of an edgy segment.
Daum
frequently alternates between Prairie City and Trout's former
stomping ground, but apparently only to contrast the stereotypically
self-absorbed fashionistas of lower Manhattan with the self-absorbed
mall-goers of the heartland. While waiting for Trout to have
a long-awaited revelation about her own life, readers are
instead treated to too-late and half-hearted humor (an over-zealous
horse ejaculates on barn dancers), limp decision making ("move
on"), and an untidy resolution (wait, does she leave? Does
she stay?).
While
The Quality of Life Report starts off as a fresh commentary
on the journey to a (seemingly) better life, it inevitably
falls flat and comes across as something akin to bad chick
lit, wherein the characters' motives are nothing if not anticipated
and wholly un-interesting. Daum is typically the tongue-in-cheek,
clever author of essays and articles that literally beg for
more of the same, but in this case, readers are left crossing
their fingers that Lucinda Trout isn't Meghan Daum's nom
de guerre and that a redeeming work is on the way.
(July,
2007)
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