Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures

Summary (from the publisher): In 1920, Elsa Emerson is born to the owners of the Cherry County Playhouse in Door County, Wisconsin. Elsa relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience. But when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child’s game of pretend. While still in her teens, Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Hollywood mogul Irving Green, who refashions her as an exotic brunette screen siren and renames her Laura Lamont. But fame has its costs, and while Laura tries to balance career, family, and personal happiness, she realizes that Elsa Emerson might not be gone completely. Ambitious and richly imagined, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is as intimate—and as bigger-than-life—as the great films of the golden age of Hollywood.

 

Review: Spanning the years from 1929 to 1980, this novel is an intimate portrayal of the life of one woman during Hollywood's golden age.  Elsa Emerson is born in 1920 in Wisconsin and enjoys appearing onstage at her parents' Cherry County Playhouse. Yet this childish game becomes something more when a tragedy strikes her family and Elsa eventually finds her escape through marriage that takes her to Los Angeles. There, she discovers Hollywood and Hollywood mogul Irving Green discovers Elsa and rebrands her as Laura Lamont. Yet despite her attempts, Laura is never able to fully expunge Elsa and must reconcile the two halves of her identity.

 

The writing of this novel is understated yet powerful, laced with an undercurrent of deep emotion that is subtly revealed to the reader. In particular, Laura's deep despair during and after her husband's illness and death is deeply moving and reveals the quiet but deep love the two shared; when Laura asks her ailing husband what he would like for Christmas, he responds, "I would like a thousand more nights with you" (201). After his death, her grief is revealed avoidance of her life: "Laura most often wanted to sleep the day away. She would tuck her knees into her chest and fall asleep in a little ball on the carpet, an overgrown puppy at no one's feet" (206). Although grounded in its historical setting, the novel's focus is undoubtedly on character development. The quietly intimate portrayal of Laura's life captures her humanity and transcends any particular time period in a way that few historical fiction novels manage to do.

 

The dominant theme throughout this novel is the divide in personality between Elsa and her later identity as Laura. "She was always two people at once, Elsa Emerson and Laura Lamont. They shared a body and a brain and a heart, conjoined twins linked in too many places to ever separate" (65). Throughout, Laura struggles to come to terms with breaking from her early identity as Elsa and making choices that she feels her earlier self as Elsa would never have made. "Elsa and Laura, before and after. There were an endless number of things that Laura was going to do that Elsa never would" (98). In many ways, Elsa's recreation as Laura is in honor of Elsa's older sister Hildy, who was meant to be the star and who never got to be: "It should have been Hildy here in Hollywood, and she - still Elsa, always Elsa - should have been at home, back in Door County, her entire world only as wide as the peninsula" (114).

 

Laura as a character is certainly imperfect. Although wounded by her mother's reaction to her life in Hollywood, her family has reason to feel abandoned and betrayed by their daughter. Likewise, Laura conveniently disposes of her first husband and seems to feel little pity for the wreck that his life becomes.  Laura's life comes full circle when she returns to the stage to perform in the same play that first took her to the stage as a child. Yet in the end, Laura realizes that her life is the greatest role she will ever fill; "she'd forgotten she wasn't the star of a romance, but a family drama, and a farce, and a tragedy" (252).

 

Stars: 4