Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman Page B

unwilling to close the cover and break the spell. I turned the book over and started over again.”
—
Boston Phoenix
“A private eye in the public sphere, [Tillman] refuses no assignment and distils the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world’s most transient artifacts and allegories. This is a truly memorable book.”
— Andrew Ross
No Lease on Life
     
    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.
“Confirms and enhances her reputation as one of America’s most challenging and adventurous writers.”
—
Guardian
“…should be awarded a special Pulitzer for the most perfect use of the word ‘moron’ in the history of the American novel.”
— Fran Lebowitz
“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, &'squo;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
“As energetic and raunchy as a New York street.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“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