Customer Reviews

Cooperative Village

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Cooperative Village is a laugh from cover to cover. Madeson hits the nail on the head, capturing the essence of living in a co-op in New York City, with it's cross section of colorful characters. The adventures she takes you through makes you want to turn the pages as fast as you can, because you won't believe it could get nuttier and it just does...
Can't wait for the next book

Fran Madeson's "Cooperative Village" is a wacky, wonderful, and frequently hysterically funny antidote for whatever George Bush has managed to do to you. I rarely laugh out loud when reading a book and I really did when I read this one. Madeson's imagination and voice are simply unlike other authors out there. It's a story, it's a political commentary, it's a cockeyed look into the world of little old Jewish ladies who rock.

There is a thread, dark skirting on despair, underlying the humor of this wonderfully disturbing book. The word 'hysterical' comes to mind, cropping up in all its several semantic fields. The Francis of narrative is driven by a desperation so acute that seeing a corpse through an entire wash-and-dry cycle in the cooperative Laundromat passes for a rational response to life in the Village: life conditioned by a level of obligatory artifice suffocatingly upbeat and right-minded--a thoroughly dehumanized 'liberalism.'

This is a deeply political book, but it's a politics that engages the disembodied cultures of what Joe Bageant has called the American Hologram, and cuts across the anachronistic distinctions of left and right, liberal conservative, progressive reactionary, an urban parallel to the literature of deconstructed suburbia, or perhaps, what happens when that same suburban misappropriation of the pursuit of happiness invades, infects and perverts the city with what is euphemistically termed, `gentrification:' the construction of sterile islands, pale ghosts of the gated communities to which the real masters have retreated, suspended above the soil of earthly existence and embodied human life and community by threads, cables chains and shackles of convention everyone agrees to pretend are invisible.

Cooperative Village is an account of how Frances, by every choice she makes, conscious or unconscious, goes about cutting her way out of the web. How perfectly appropriate, that in the end--in the view from the web... she vanishes from existence... or non-existence. This reader wishes her well, that beyond the automatic gates and doors of the Cooperative Village--she may find there is still the possibility of real life on this good earth.

This book was laugh out loud funny for me. The florid writing in this novel came to me at just the time in my life when I needed it most. If you are originally from NY like myself and are aching for the city then this book is a good place to start.

I've not had such a good, continuous laugh from cover to cover! Yet, behind the delicious, very Yiddish, humor, there's a Chaplinesque (or Woody Alan) quality in Madeson's novel in which the author is clearly the protagonist! But the fiction is uncomfortably close to the real social and political conditions in contemporary America, which renders it more than "A Novel."

this humor in this book is incredibly dry, original and astute. New Yorkers should especially appreciate it but many of the scenes will crack up anyone anywhere...and, to boot, it's all in the interest of a great cause

Frances Madeson has a vivid imagination. Working from the real and cultural geography and of an actual New York City housing development, she creates a web of hysterially over-the-top characters whose outrageous behavior seems normal to each other. It is dripping with social and political satire. It is a wonderful, unique and truly funny book.

I enjoyed parts of this book, but it was too scattered (which I think was done by design). I guess this is suppose to be a wacky look at a strange days in the lower east side, with a few negative comments about her old job to make you wonder where she worked and more comments about her mother that makes you wonder about what the mother did.

This book should definitely be on your summer reading list; it's the perfect beach- or pool-side companion. (WARNING: put it down long enough to apply sunscreen!) Madeson's fanciful tale kept my rapt attention as I turned page after page in disbelief-- what would the fictional Frances do next? This kooky adventure through the Lower East Side of Manhattan (I'll never think of Grand Street the same way again!) is the perfect amuse bouche; my palette is whetted for Madeson's next literary triumph! Don't keep us waiting too long, please!

Cooperative Village is a fresh new novel filled with humor, insight, and the kind of ecclectic voice that leaves the reader delighted. Frances Madeson brings to life a subculture of Manhattan that is rich and diverse. Inside that world she is our trusted guide and our entertainer, illuminating everything from organized religion to recommended air freshener. All the while she propels an intriguing plot line that will keep you engaged from the first page to the last. It's a great story.

Don't miss this warm, funny, valentine of a book. It will make you smile and keep you smiling.