'U.S.A.' is a little D.O.A.
From my grandmother's collection (to be fair, she was going to throw it away):
Letts also wrote Where the Heart Is, a movie perhaps better known for being on Natalie Portman's resume.
Lutie is your typical bratty, stubborn teenager with a knack for shoplifting who was recently kicked off her school's gymnastics team. Fate is her younger brother, a neurotic 10-year-old with an unquenchable desire to read and learn. They live with Floy, their deadbeat dad's ex-girlfriend - that is, until she drops dead at a check-out line at the local Wal-mart. Not wanting to be cast off to some tyrannical foster home, Lutie hatches a quick plan to go to Las Vegas to try and track Dad down; not wanting to be left behind, Fate goes with her. Once they arrive, homeless, broke, and with no idea to go, they try to find any way to make some money. For Lutie, this entails modelling for a sleezy agent and working in a hotel where the boss will sexually assault you at any given time. They survive partially because of the unexpected gifts of a faceless stranger, but they know they can't rely on random acts of kindness forever. Unless such an act can save Lutie from a terrible fate.
It's been rare that I pick up a book that has a strong beginning and then reaches an underwhelming conclusion. Made in the U.S.A. was such a book for me: while it starts out with a fine introduction of two memorable characters, somewhere in the middle things get muddled and the focus shifts away from them. Why Letts chooses to do this is odd, because Lutie and Fate are all I want to read about. Lutie's tough personality and Fate's sensibility complement each other rather well, and their plight comes across as sadly realistic. How they each struggle with the situation that they are in suits their characters, and adds some development (as seen in Lutie's desire to send Fate to a good school). We definitely see a side of Vegas that isn't in the brochure - skanky hotels, homeless shelters, the aforementioned porno industry, etc. And Letts doesn't sugarcoat it: both siblings are attacked, although in very different ways.
It's once Lutie and Fate get away from Vegas that the narrative falls apart. A subplot is brought in way too late in the novel that weighs everything down, mostly because it loses sight of Lutie and Fate - Lutie in particular. By making the cast of characters bigger and asking us to care about them all, Letts takes a risk that doesn't really pay off. Plus, for all her fine work in creating a solid character sketch for Lutie, her character arc grows limp. Instead of examining the ramifications of the two different kinds of assaults that Lutie endures, some last-minute mommy issues pop up and quietly explained away. This feels a little cheap and disrespectful of the character. Broader themes such as what it means to be a family are less subtle and add no tension. We don't even get to see Lutie and Fate's reconciliation - we just hear about it from other characters.
I like parts of the book, but in the end I wasn't impressed. Mostly bland except for a few disturbing scenes, U.S.A. is ultimately too modest to really be anything to write home about. Rating: 3 belly-button rings out of 5.