Cast in Doubt (32 page)

—
Dennis Cooper

“This complex and skillfully constructed novel has three separate storylines following the lives of three girls growing up in New York, maturing in a world of baffling freedoms and uncertainties… Childhood fears, passionate friendships, sexual explorations, and the uncomfortable interdependency of parents and children are depicted with intelligence, honesty, and dark humor. But if you are looking for comfort and consolation, you must look elsewhere: Tillman writes about life as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

—
Times
(UK)

“Lynne Tillman’s writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring… To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today.”

—
John Zorn

“Lynne Tillman’s haunted houses are Freudian ones—the psyches of three girls, Emily, Jane, and Grace, each wrestling with the psychological ‘ghosts’ that shape them… Frequently shifting points of view are expressed in crisp sentences. Rather than forming a modernist stream of consciousness, however, the writing remains controlled.”

—
Lucy Atkins
,
Times Literary Supplement

For the narrator of
Motion Sickness
, life is an unguided tour. Adrift in Europe, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she’s befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, or may or may not be stalking her. In Paris, she shacks up with Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velázquez’s painting
Las Meninas
. In Amsterdam, she teams up with a Belgian friend, who is studying prostitutes, and she tours Italy with deeply mismatched English brothers. And, as with an epic journey, the true trajectory is inwards, ever inwards, into her own dreams and desires…

“A close reading [of Tillman] yields just how much her characters do want to connect, while preserving the right to their own process of intellection, the life of the mind.
Haunted Houses
,
Motion Sickness
and
Absence Makes the Heart
are nothing if not testaments to the belief that presenting the quality of one’s mind in public is a means of connecting to others beside the self. In scenes of degradation, annihilation or joy, she contends with the idea that one’s thoughts and gestures, while seemingly at odds, are married… attempts to accept the other not as a mirror but as a self.”

—
Hilton Als
,
Voice Literary Supplement
, Best Books of 1991

“Literature is a quirky thing and just when you start to believe it actually has been used up, along comes a writer, Lynne Tillman, whose work is so striking and original it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings…”

—
Los Angeles Reader

“A firsthand account of one woman’s European journey and a riveting investigation of the troublesome notion of ‘national identity,’
Motion Sickness
has true intellectual originality, a gorgeously sly dry irony, and a rich cast of thinkers and drinkers and eccentrics and hoods.”

—
Patrick McGrath

“This is Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
rewritten by the opposite sex in the form of vignettes of far-flung places and implausible encounters… Impressions, associations, and bits of conversation jotted during lulls in a mostly manic itinerary, coalesce into a densely descriptive narrative. The result is a keen portrayal of the postmodern world….”

—
Ginger Danto
,
Entertainment Weekly

“An intense and personal narrative. People and events are approached obliquely and never fully explained, as if we might know them already. This lean book is a welcome change after the baroque excesses of much contemporary fiction. Recommended for sophisticated readers.”

—
Library Journal

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, ‘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 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

The stories in
Someday This Will Be Funny
marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators—by turn infamous and nameless—shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention—stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.

“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 its closing.”

—
Time Out
on
No Lease on Life

“Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine—not because I ‘admire’ her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That’s how I feel…”

—
Jonathan Safran Foer

“One of America’s most challenging and adventurous writers.”

—
Guardian

“Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.”

—
Edmund White

“Anything I’ve read by Tillman I’ve devoured.”

—
Anne K. Yoder
,
The Millions

“If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [
American Genius, A Comedy
] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years.”

—
Blake Butler
,
HTML Giant