The book is populated by people who appear in his life but not Didion’s. This can leave your head spinning, as if an acquaintance is breathlessly telling story after story about names you can’t quite place ... There’s a gentle restraint to Uptown Local — a quick read, at barely over 200 pages — that partly redeems it. Such a book could easily exploit the hunger for revelations about Didion, but Leadbeater avoids that impulse ... Plenty of Uptown Local is almost painfully self-conscious. But the giant chip on its shoulder — about Didion’s circle, and Leadbeater’s family, and fate and fortune and the universe — makes it hard at times to appreciate.
Less a revelation of life with Didion than a poetic, ruminative chronicle of Leadbeater’s struggle to synthesize the author’s sophisticated world with that of his lower-middle-class family ... This book’s well-wrought sentences mostly carry it forward despite loose plotting, but there are times when it stumbles due to uneven pacing ... And we hear less and less about Leadbeater’s time with Didion as the memoir progresses. We’re left to wonder what she made of his lowest periods.
This is ultimately a book about distances. The distance between Leadbeater’s nascent, frustrated literary efforts and the great body of work that lies behind Didion ... Leadbeater makes us see there was so much more to her (to all of us) than just one thing. Strength, Leadbeater learns from the woman herself, means not cracking up when confronted with life’s irreconcilable distances, but somehow living with them.
Though Didion didn’t live to see this work, one senses she would have been equally delighted with her protégé’s literary talent and, not least, his unblinking honesty.
In hypnotic prose that pulses with life and longing, The Uptown Local explores the fault lines of class, family, loss and creativity. It is a love letter to a cultural icon.
At the line level, the text is expansive and poetic, full of vivid imagery and small, well-voiced epiphanies. However, Leadbeater as the protagonist barely changes throughout the book, partly because the plot’s unifying revelation occurs in the final five pages, leaving little time for readers to see the effect this realization had on his journey.
