Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick: A Novel of Separation

In vignettes that are meant to resonate but instead remain glib fragments, Resnick's debut novel charts the tormented journey of 20-something Brown graduate Rebecca Roth as she moves west to L.A. to escape the memory of her mother, who killed herself when Rebecca was a teenager. Seeing her mother's ghost everywhere, a driven yet self-loathing Rebecca bounces from job to job (logging tapes at Entertainment Tonight, acting as personal assistant to a mad screenwriter named Stavros) and from man to man (Isaac the beautiful slacker, Giorgio the unavailable accountant) as an artsy proletariat in the lower rungs of the film and television industry. She lives in a self-described world of futons, lithium and chaos, feeling she must emulate her film idols Fellini and Antonioni. Resnick narrates Rebecca's adventures nonchronologically, jumping between the late '80s and the mid-'90s; her impressions, mostly in the first person but sometimes third, are interspersed with snapshots of life in L.A., featuring characters ranging from a one-legged agent's assistant named Esmeralda to a cow killed by Satanists on a hotel roof. As a result, the distanced reader gains only a fractured portrait of Rebecca, the city and the time period. With chapter titles such as ""My First Abortion"" and ""More Things She Learned in Therapy,"" the prose is outweighed by the pose. When Rebecca says, ""nobody escapes vanity here, or shallow dreams or basest desires,"" the reader versed in Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero has already grown numb to her frenetic tale. (Apr.)