"I have always liked Sylvia Weiser's writing."-- John Irving History happens to everyone. Even people in the Valley. From the heady days of the Tien An Men crisis to the dawn of a new decade, four LA suburbanites-businessman, playwright, professor, and housewife-confront artists and philistines, lawyers and liars, in a series of quixotic quests for love, redemption, and the meaning of democracy-right in their own backyards. Funny, caustic, exuberant, rueful, 1989 is American Kafka, updated and feminized Philip Roth, a fast-moving novel with plot twists and a grand reversal, as well-written as it is absorbing. "A comic twist in every sentence."--Michigan Review "Don't miss this humanistic satire"--Los Angeles magazine