Tense, twisted and briskly paced, poet Laura Sims's debut novel, Looker, is the progressively disturbing story of one woman's grief-fueled spiral downward to an irredeemable rock bottom.
Looker's unnamed narrator starts out fairly sympathetic. Her marriage and her finances have recently collapsed under the strain of years of unsuccessful fertility treatments. She lives alone with her ex-husband's cat, and she spends most of her time smoking on the stoop outside her New York City apartment building. Still stinging from loss, she's bitter and self-pitying, but she's also a poet with a wry, dark humor and a keenly observant eye.
Soon her heartbreak curdles into resentment and self-loathing, a poison that warps her judgment and slowly narrows her vision to one obsessive, laser-focused point. That point is her neighbor, a beautiful, very famous actress with a handsome husband, three adorable children and a gorgeous home into which the narrator has a direct view.
To the narrator, the actress appears blessed and untouchable, her life almost grotesque in its apparent perfection.
"It strikes me as funny--that billions of us could be schlepping along... barely surviving, while one person gets to be praised and lifted up by eternal light," the narrator muses as she watches the exquisitely dressed actress float by with her baby. "When she passes my stoop without turning to look, I'm there with my cigarette in one hand, the other covering my mouth, convulsing with laughter."
Despite this bitterness, the narrator, whose life is becoming disastrously unstable, develops a frantic and obsessive desire to make an impression on the actress. Her obsession, already a bit hostile, takes a destructive turn, and by the novel's last pages, the narrator's desires for connection and friendship have warped into delusional fantasies of trespass, violation and, eventually, something even darker.
Somewhat surprisingly, the most disturbing thing about Looker is the creeping sense of complicity that Sims engenders in the reader. Her first-person, present-tense narration forces readers to join the narrator as she grows more daring, as though we too are peering in the actress's kitchen windows and stealing things from her front yard. However, the actress is never more than an image, while the narrator's psychological unraveling is starkly, brutally real. By the end, Sims compels us to ask: Have we been deranged, predatory voyeurs into the actress's life--or into the narrator's? --Hannah Calkins, a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.
Shelf Talker: There's nothing innocent about "looking" in Looker, the insidiously unsettling story of a woman obsessed with her celebrity neighbor.