Claire is middle-aged, a traveling saleswoman of high-tech medical supplies. Early in the novel she begins a hotel-hopping journey of self-discovery that jeopardizes her job, marriage and sanity. What sets her off is a confession by her surgeon husband that he has had an affair with a woman colleague, and what helps bring her back from the brink are sexual encounters with an 18-year-old boy and then with the boy's father. Zeidner manages to make both encounters believable.
There's good dialogue and sharply amusing observations about American life at the end of the 20th century, but the biggest surprise is the skill with which Zeidner writes about sex. "Layover" is playfully and insightfully erotic, a quality most American writers can't seem to imagine, let alone capture on the page.
I didn't quite like Claire - she's smug and intolerant of human frailties, a vagabond with a big bank account - but I believed her grief and admired the way Zeidner handled her struggle to overcome the sense that she and everyone else are doomed to suffer in solitude. Claire wants to return to normal life but is plagued by the feeling that she knew her husband "so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together - they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn."
"Layover" is funny and sad, smart and brave. Read it if you like fiction that explores what it means to be human.