Say Hello to ‘Goodbye To All That’: A Book Review

 Book: Goodbye to All That
Author: Margo Candela
Publisher: Touchstone
Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2010

On the sidebar of her blog, “My Brain, My Blog,” Margo Candela combines the covers of her four books into one book jacket with the caption, “You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll have a good time. Trust me.”

Margo Candela

I haven’t read Candela’s other books. But I can say while reading her 2010 release, Goodbye To All That, that I laughed out loud more than once, winced in disappointment for her sympathetic and pathetic characters several times, and without equivocation, had a wonderful time. Now I know I can trust her to deliver on that all-too-elusive good read, just like she promised.

Candela is clever, often outrageous, and fills this book with characters who revel in being themselves, whether it's genuinely self-effacing, philandering, tender-hearted, laughable, or merely fiercely gutsy. Twenty-something Raquel Azorian is one such viewpoint character. Candela plops the reader in her head from the first line of the novel. It’s so much fun being there—hanging with Raquel—you have to wonder why Raquel’s still single and why so many people work so hard to remove her from her job throughout the book. She’s an executive assistant at Belmore Corporation, a gigantic Hollywood moviemaker, and is much smarter and more resourceful than the position allows her to be. For instance, she instinctively knows when to open her mouth and when to keep it closed. (We all should be so wise.)

So, it’s entirely believable that she finds herself at a professional crossroads before too long, having outgrown the job she’s in. Should she use everything she’s learned at Belmore combined with her strong intuition and common sense to make a power play and get that promotion she richly deserves? Of course, she should. The reader’s been rooting for her since page one when she confesses to the reader that LA doesn’t have real weather and that the only storms you’re likely to find are on a soundstage.

Though Candela grew up in Los Angeles, this is only her first novel set there. Based on Candela's rendering of her hometown, LA has so little real character—teeming with shallow people with shallow goals whose commitments are thinner than the skins of Hollywood starlets—that it has a sort of anti-character—an abundance of it. If you’ve always believed Hollywood to be a cut-throat, miserable, empty place to live and work, this novel will not dissuade you of that opinion. At the same time, it’s exciting to be a fly on the wall of a swanky club or a posh hotel in West LA, and Candela masterfully shuttles the reader from a Hollywood party to a Bel Air mansion to police station at two in the morning a without sacrificing a single beat of plot or character.

Goodbye To All That is a very funny novel with a cast of complex dysfunctional characters. One of the things I really like about Candela’s humor is that it only sounds bitchy when coming from a character who’s been painted as a Class A bitch. And the novel sports a few of them, both female and male varieties. Raquel gripes about her off-center, self-centered mother whom she calls both Mom and Marlene, depending on her mood, but behaves with more compassion than her mother deserves. Why? Because its part of Raquel’s nature to do the right thing. Even when doing the right thing means forfeiting a level of personal happiness that everyone’s entitled to, to some degree.

If I had to categorize it, this book falls under the recently maligned sub-genre of chick lit, which was even dubbed a dead genre by more than a few literary agents. If chick lit is dead, either someone forgot to tell Margo Candela, or she’s the author who’ll resurrect it with smart, entertaining books like Goodbye To All That. With any luck, Candela will give readers the chance to hang with Raquel in another book, holding down a different but equally outrageous Hollywood job before too long.

Review:  four out of four noggins