America the Beautiful
By Moon Unit Zappa
Scribner/$14
Forget whatever baggage your own parents may or may not have saddled you with — consider the case of Moon Unit Zappa. How does a creative young woman go about emerging from the long shadow cast by the legendary Frank Zappa? Introduced to the world as the air-headed, totally bitchen teen on her father's 1982 novelty hit "Valley Girl," and after almost two decades of schlumping around Hollywood in less-than-distinguished acting jobs, Moon Zappa has come into her own with her talent for words. Witness her debut novel, America the Beautiful.
The title refers not to our fair nation but to the book's protagonist, America Throne, a struggling "C-level celebrity" who must, in the midst of career and family trials, work her way back to a state of independence after a particularly painful breakup with her artist-boyfriend Jasper Hutch. America surveys the wreckage of her life in millennial Los Angeles with a wry, unflinchingly honest eye that swings between charming self-deprecation and painful self-pity, and as much as some readers might want to dislike this trust-funded, self-involved character, at a certain point America's problems become your problems. Sort of.
It is unfair to speculate too much on how autobiographical Moon Zappa's novel may be. For readers more-than-casually familiar with Frank Zappa's career, the details of America's family history with her own "genius" father — a painter and sculptor — are fascinating, even shocking. Yet, however intimate the bits and pieces, the voyeur/reader comes up against this fact: America and her world are fictional. Moon Zappa appears aware of this tension between fact and fiction, and although America has to come to terms with the personal legacy of her father, ultimately she finds independence from that legacy in becoming her own beautiful self.
There is the slight scent of marketing savvy about this book. Its appearance as a paperback original (cheap), its use of blurbs from angry/sarcastic fem-figures Janeane Garofalo and Alanis Morissette on the cover. And inside, especially early in the novel, a few passages could have used some editing — they seem either too much like standup material or therapeutic ranting. Overall, however, America the Beautiful improves as it goes, and we come to appreciate its narrator's honesty and wit, the depth of her pain, the difficulty of her journey and the peace she finds at the end of it all. And we hope Moon Zappa has many more stories to tell.
—Mark Hayes
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2001.