Wary as she is, Annie, because she is like us, is available to the dream that flourishes on the West Coast. During a period of her life that would seem familiar to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, to Bellow’s Dangling Man, to Ellison’s Invisible Man, Annie, while waiting for her life’s next event to overtake her, lies low and essentially does nothing but go to the movies: “It was the movie music that hypnotized her—those swollen pulsating chords, the pudding texture of beaten pianos and whipped violins as the lovers kissed, as the mist covered the mansion, as the ship’s prow rose and sank upon orderly oceans…she wept…because of that music, a smothering syrup that drowned her brains, yet released in her a flood of melancholy that through some alchemy became a kind of exaltation.” This is as good an analysis of sentimentality as we could ask for. It says what one can about the confected dreams of Hollywood. Ms. Fox’s dark humor, her sense of the absurd, is richly conveyed in those beaten pianos and whipped violins. Furthermore, this passage accompanies two important sets of events in the story of Annie’s becoming a self she might wish to be. First, she becomes a model and, on the fringes of Hollywood’s body cult, is openly and commercially adored by men; Hollywood’s commodification of sexuality, and actors’ and models’ commodification of themselves, is confronted. More important, Annie’s sexual activity—at the time when her soul is most enmired—increases: “She discovered, or, rather, recognized at last, that men wanted to do this thing to her they wanted to do to anyone. Her body, the object, was of no value to her. Yet somewhere, like a hidden depravity, she felt love for it, pitied it like the lost animals she sometimes saw slinking into the doorways of closed shops late at night.” The character’s insight into herself, as she grows intellectually, is large and frightening: while an odalisque, she is also an analyst; you covet her body, you look up it to her face, and she is staring into you, understanding both you and herself all too well. The disgust here is ferocious. Young women, beginning to write in 2001, can learn much from this woman who, in 1972, was speaking on their behalf.