Reviewed by Laurence Dumortier
5.7.07

Meet Isabelle and Al, the protagonists of Tara Ison’s new novel The List. She’s a budding heart surgeon, about to begin her residency at UCLA. He’s the one-time director of a cult classic with no further ambition but to keep working at the video store where he’s clerked since finishing his movie years ago. She’s all high-strung energy and milky skin and obsessive studying. He’s slow-moving as honey, with a great big body Isabelle imagines she can float on like a raft, and as obsessive about old-Hollywood movies as Isabelle is about anatomy. Their push-pull intensity has left them, after three years of on-again-off-again, facing their ultimate break-up—the Big One, the real thing. In order to make it stick, in order to achieve that elusive state, “closure,” they devise a plan. Ten items on a list of things they’d always wished they’d done together.

Much to the consternation of friends, family, and colleagues on both sides who have never approved of the mismatched relationship, Isabelle and Al embark on their series of last dates. The first items on The List are innocent enough: tortillas at Olvera Street, a twilight stroll on the Santa Monica pier and steamed clams. But as buried resentments, lingering passion, and fear of leaving each other mix to create a heady and destructive atmosphere, The List becomes more twisted, and their behavior more desperate. The project becomes less about ending the relationship, and more about hurting each other, and the whole endeavor spins dangerously out of control.

Ison, whose first novel A Child Out of Alcatraz was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award, was previously a screenwriter, and her love of film shines through the comic haze of Al’s amiable, but intense, slacker-nerdhood. There’s even a hilarious section, in screenplay form, replaying, through Al’s eyes, Isabelle’s med-school graduation party, where the couple announce their imminent break-up to bewildered guests. Ison also nails the needle-sharp and panicky focus of Isabelle’s desperate drive to succeed, though Isabelle herself can’t explain why or even if she enjoys it very much. From early childhood Isabelle’s foremost responsibility has been to hone and develop her intellectual ability. She can’t fathom a person like Al who has talent as a filmmaker but chooses not to pursue it further because he doesn’t like directing.

Darkly funny and sexually explicit, Ison’s novel is a twisted romp through the toxicity of an ill-matched couple. But it is also a thoughtful meditation on the nature and limits of love. In its comic, engaging, and oddball way, Ison’s novel reflects the pressure we put on ourselves, and those we love, to conform to standard notions of success. It questions, also, the narrowness of our definition of love. The novel seems to believe in a higher, more elaborate and mature form of love than the one worshipped in contemporary culture—the materialistic envy embodied in today’s Brangelina-adoration: They’re so beautiful together, they have it all. Though The List’s protagonists are ill-equipped to reach this more complicated and higher plane of love, they dare to look for it in dark corners and hilarious places.