About this item
Highlights
- A National Book Critic Circle Award Finalist, No Lease on Life hannels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York.
- About the Author: Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books.
- 230 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay.The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the mean-spirited landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life.
Though Elizabeth fights on for normalcy and sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own.
Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, "No Lease on Life" is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.
Book Synopsis
A National Book Critic Circle Award Finalist, No Lease on Life hannels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York.
The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.
"She's a character who stays with you after you put the book down--a creature of occasional dark impulses, intermittent grumpiness and perennial willingness to pull up her socks and deal. And, oddly enough, you're also left with a sense of Tillman's paradoxical, contentious affection for New York in all its epic exasperatingness."--New York Times Book Review
"Both entertaining and unnerving. . . If fiction is a mirror that shows the life and slime of our times, then this writer has her finger on the wavering pulse of our century at it's closing."--Time Out
"As energetic and raunchy as a New York street"--San Francisco Chronicle
"A funny, frightening, and utterly brilliant tour de force."-- Bay Area Reporter
Review Quotes
Praise for No Lease on Life
"Confirms and enhances her reputation as one of America's most challenging and adventurous writers." - Guardian
"No Lease on Life hould be awarded a special Pulitzer for the most perfect use of the word "moron" in the history of the American novel." - Fran Lebowitz
"As energetic and raunchy as a New York street." - San Francisco Chronicle
"[Elizabeth] neither recoils nor romanticizes . . . . She's a character who stays with you after you put the book down-a creature of occasional dark impulses, intermittent grumpiness and perennial willingness to pull up her socks and deal." - David Gates, New York Times Book Review
"A book anyone concerned with urban life, women, or American culture, as it stumbles into the 21st century, must read."-Sapphire
"Exquisite... To encounter a writer of Tillman's acute intelligence writing as well as this is a cause for real celebration." Independent (UK)
"Tillman describes much of the wearing, wearying routine of the city's daily life -- all that garbage, all those druggies and creeps and whores we've met in a million Letterman one-liners jammed into a scrawny crevice of land while the rest of America's so huge and airy and free. But Tillman's book is utopian precisely because it takes those things into account; because its heroine fantasizes about murdering all 'the morons' not out of hate, 'but dignity and a social space, a civil space, actually civilian space.' . . . [Tillman] sprinkles the text with dozens and dozens of jokes . . . . Who can't relate? Isn't every public-transportation-riding, rent-paying, law-abiding urban dweller about two or three knock-knock jokes away from homicide?" - Sarah Vowell, Salon
"Richly surreal . . . yet darkly humorous . . .Tillman demonstrates her wit, superb observational skill, realism of representation, and verbal eloquence... No Lease on Life is a meditation on the realness and the ridiculousness of daily living. Yet again, Tillman tackles issues on her terms, freshly reshaping traditional literary forms." -Donna Seaman, Booklist
"We first meet Elizabeth sitting at the window of her East Village apartment at 5 a.m. spinning gruesome revenge fantasies about the noisy hoodlums in the street . . . this novel [is] graced by flashes of bilious wit, a series of funny, inconsequential jokes and an appealingly loopy milieu." - Publishers Weekly
"A terribly up-close and personal examination of urban angst and fury. It is also a funny, frightening, and utterly brilliant tour de force." - Bay Area Reporter
"Darkly humorous . . . [the] New York that one doesn't see on Seinfeld." - Library Journal
"In a society that increasingly deals with the unbearable by cleaning 'it' up, by sweeping the streets and parks of the homeless and addicted, and/or stashing 'it' away (in ghettos, prisons, etc.), No Lease on Life provides a straight-on view and acknowledgment of the unbearable, if not an acceptance. What Elizabeth collects keeps her from sleeping, drives her to thoughts of murder, and yet 'she [has] to be open ... like a window ... sometimes transparent, usually paradoxical, and always open to tragicomic views of life.'" - Elisabeth Sheffield, Review of Contemporary Fiction
About the Author
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists, writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her last collection of short stories, This Is Not It, included 23 stories based on the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy, Cast in Doubt, and Motion Sickness, among others. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, professor and writer-in-residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.