Customer Reviews

The Fran Lebowitz Reader

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Fran Lebowitz's "The Fran Lebowitz Reader" is a must for anyone interested in the best in "urban cool" writing. Lebowitz is unusual in being an American humorist of the barbed--not warm and fuzzy, like Erma Bombeck--variety. She lays on the sarcasm and the weary, I've-seen-it-all attitude a little thick at times, but hey, this woman was born in the wrong era and you can't blame her for that. Picture Dorothy Parker come back to life with a fleshier face and uncooperative hair and you have a decent picture of Lebowitz.

I can't resist quoting. Some of these are classics that you may be surprised to learn came from Lebowitz:

"My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish."

* * *

"There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death."

* * *

"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable."

* * *

"[In grade school,] I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey."

* * *

"Polite conversation is rarely either."

* * *

"The only appropriate reply to the queston, 'Can I be frank?' is 'Yes, if I can be Barbara.' "

* * *

"Looking genuinely attentive is like sawing a girl in half and then putting her back together. It is seldom achieved without the use of mirrors."

* * *

Well, I could go on and on, clearly, but I'll stop quoting if only just to say that this is the kind of sophisticated humor book you can devour in one gulp--or pace yourself and enjoy it slowly and luxuriously, like nibbling away at a particularly fine bittersweet chocolate mousse.

Despite the occasional reference which dates these pieces to their 1970s origin (such as instructions for disco behavior), most of the essays hold up amazingly well because they do the time-honored humorist trick of commenting on basic human foibles. This is a delightful, subversive book.

Look, anyone who can proclaim that their idea of exercise is having to light their own cigarette has got my vote.

There are some brilliant pieces in here, but there is no question that they were of a time. The selections from Metropolitan Life work best for me; they are, as one would've said in '70s Manhattan, "a stitch". Still, I can't imagine even a modern new yorker not being able to identify greatly with some of these insights and witticisms. Kind of like the movie Arthur, it evokes a different time but you'll still be able to recognize all the people and feelings. And it's damn, damn funny.

As another reviewer begged, come back Fran, we need to read what you have to say about today's anti-smoking, anti-dancing, anti-livable, post-Giuliani town.

Fran Lebowitz is a real one-of-a-kind humorist: basically, she's a Manhattan-centric, curmudgeonly, Jewish lesbian who writes in Wildean aphorisms. She's delightful, and if you've ever seen her on TV it's almost impossible not to hear her sentences in her bemused tones. This collection represents almost all of her writing she's ever published: two bestselling studies from the Seventies, "Metropolitan Life" and "Social Studies." They're funny but extremely dated: Lebowitz's observations on "discotheques" and CD radios seem extremely quaint today. Famously, Lebowitz has suffered from writer's block since publishing these (very short) two collections. True to form, this edition advertises "A New Preface by the Author" which is only one paragraph long. I can't give this much higher of a rating because these pieces are so dated: it's time for Lebowitz to write something new and of our time.

I first read Fran Lebowitz's delightful essays back in the late 70s and early 80s when they were fresh, new, and exciting. Recently in a mood for just her insightful, ironic take on the world again, I dug out my dog-eared copies of METROPOLITAN LIFE and SOCIAL STUDIES only to find ... that they're just as fresh, new, and exciting today as they were then.

Fran Lebowitz falls both into the tradition of great humorist essayists like H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker and of social satirists like Juvenal and Horace. She doesn't suffer fools gladly but, despite what other reviewers have said below, she doesn't suffer them unkindly either. In fact, I came across the current book as I was searching this web site desperately hoping that she had published another book after her two great earlier triumphs, and I was stunned to see the bile and venom emitted by some of the reviewers. Fran Lebowitz is FUNNY. (I mean, laugh-out-loud funny.) She's SATIRICAL. There is absolutely nothing in her works at which to be offended (seriously).

Her take on the world is that of a slightly world-weary urban sophisticate. It probably doesn't hurt that this is a style I particularly admire or that so many of her views reflect my own. (She had me at "The outdoors is what you have to go through to get from the apartment into the taxi.")

The essays in this book are terrifically written, models of wit and good style, admirably concise, and still pertinent today.

Absolutely uproarious! By the second page, I was on the floor nearly asphixiating from laughter. Lebowitz has an innate flair for striking the funny bone with a combination of a purposefully erudite tone and an unapolgetically self-oriented perspective. Not for the dull-witted.

A somewhat amusing look at society, New York, and the audibly tan by a woman who knows all. She really does. Wonderful answers to questions you did no know existed. Swell and dandy I'd have to say

I got this book for Christmas, and I read it in 1 day. I simply couldn't put it down. Since reading it, however, I have experienced some rather strange side effects, the most dangerous of which involves the blurting out of random Franian quotes on innocent bystanders. However, reading the book is well worth the risk involved. Fran Lebowitz is the most intelligent writer alive today. Too bad she isn't also the most prolific. Where are you, Fran? We want more!

Fran Lebowitz is sometimes referred to as the successor to Dorothy Parker. A few similarities are apparent. Both are sharp-witted, female New Yorkers famous for their often stinging one-liners. Yet, if Parker could be considered a painter of the urban American landscape in the 1920s through 1950s, Lebowitz should be considered a sketch artist from the 1970s. I don't think she has Parker's depth or sense of structure. Her essays are playful but often amount to mere list making or an assemblage of loosely connected observations that could just as well belong on a greeting card or cocktail napkin. And she often relies way too heavily on puns. Several pieces in this collection fall flat for me. Yet others - such as her advice to heiresses, "At Home with Pope Ron," and "The Last Laugh" - were quite clever. I think she's worth reading as perhaps one of the leading humorists of her generation. Comparisons with the more versatile and compelling Parker are a bit of a stretch, though.

This is actually a compilation of two of Lebowitz's books, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. It is a mixture of pure humor and social commentary, with the emphasis on the commentary. While I found it pretty funny, I will admit that I didn't get all of the jokes, as she wrote in and about New York in the Seventies, so that it is both out of my region and before my time (what the heck is est anyway?) Another thing to bear in mind is that she uses a lot of stereotypes, especially about homosexuals, which could be found offensive. The best parts of the book are the ones where Lebowitz doesn't really have a point to make but just takes a topic and stretches and twists it to ridiculous proportions.

... if you happened to live in Manhattan mid 70s - mid 80s. If you did you've probably read all of these pieces but it's a treat to read them again. If you didn't some of this may not tickle you as much but Lebowitz is as sharp an observer and terse a wit as anyone.