No Lease on Life

By Lynne Tillman

Book Overview

This book channels 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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 015100272X
• ISBN13: 9780151002726
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 179 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A great collection of jokes

Ms. Tillman has once again created another memorable narrator and voice. NO LEASE ON LIFE is a remarkably quick read, rife with interesting characters and observations. I enjoyed the joke motif throughout the book. Clearly, the BIG JOKE is on anyone willing to live in NYC.

Wicked Humor and Thrilling Talent

Lynne Tillman's No Lease on Life is a brilliant and magical novel. Impossible to put down, it's utterly, wildly hilarious. It's a darkly comic tale of mayhem in pre-millennial New York City, shot through with such lawless, wicked humor that one may find oneself laughing uncontrollably, out loud. It traces 24 hours inside the troubled mind of Elizabeth Hall -- a woman on the verge of committing a violent crime. Written in an urgent, percussive prose, it's irresistable, hurtling forward with the momentum of a rock thrown through a window. Opening with a barbed joke about drive-by shootings, No Lease on Life takes place in a dangerous, hilariously funny realm beyond the margins of good manners and good taste. Jokes appear throughout the novel, like rude remarks blurted out, unexpectedly, at a cocktail party. Hugely entertaining in themselves, the jokes accentuate the kinetic, jaunty rhythm of Tillman's writing. They poke serial killers, Jews, WASPS, African Americans, Puerto Ricans and everyone in between. Nothing is sacred. Brimming with in-your-face sass, the narrator is impossibly entertaining. Her "inner voice" is foul-mouthed and ill-tempered, as well as captivating and completely charming. Elizabeth's burning, unrealized ambition is to be a killer. The people she'd enjoy murdering are the loud-mouthed morons who noisily invade her East Village block every night. They amuse themselves by throwing garbage cans and throwing vomiting contests. They make it impossible for Elizabeth, and everyone else, to get any sleep. Pissed-off, irritable and murderous, Elizabeth isn't a nice character. Yet she elicits the reader's sympathy immediately. She's Every Chick who's ever tried to keep her block clean, or her hallway free of garbage and needles. She's a one-woman urban avenger in a world where barbaric, dehumanizing forces have mysteriously taken over. Tillman's novel is suffused with violence, humor, and the percussive energy of urban life. It's an acid-etched valentine to New York

Wonderful Narrative Style; Engaging

Ms. Tillman engages the reader through excellent narration, vivid descriptions, and developed characters. Simply a work of art.

No Lease on Life: It's good

I am a fan of Lynne Tillman's fiction and happened to notice that the Kirkus review for her new novel NO LEASE ON LIFE badly misrepresents the book. The reviewer just doesn't get it, especially the crack about "too much familiar material". I thought that the hero of the book had a very unusual way of seeing her environment - which is pretty urban and tough - but, in spite of its faults, she was deeply engaged with the lives around her. I found it to be a wonderful and believable (and fun) way to react to our modern cities. Check out the fantastic (and accurate) review from the Los Angeles Times, which got it right and will give potential readers who might indeed want to buy the book a chance to get the story right. There's also, if you haven't seen it, a very clever, to-the-point commentary on NO LEASE IN LIFE under "Briefly Noted" in the lastest New Yorker. By the way, Cast In Doubt is my favorite book of hers. Check it out, too.