Lying in Bed [Hardcover]

J. D. Landis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 1995

Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters. LYING IN BED begins with the voice of a strange, compelling speaker. The more we learn of his life and his most unusual marriage, the less we are sure of who he is and what he says. LYING IN BED first seduces us with its intense storytelling, then ensnares us in a dangerous psychological and erotic labyrinth we never want to leave.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Landis, former editor-in-chief at William Morrow (where he published writers like Robert Pirsig and Richard Powers, a possible clue to his offbeat mindset), is presenting this as his first novel, although he has written other adult and children's titles under pseudonyms. Likely to cause a considerable stir, it's one of the most uninhibited and intensely sexy novels to appear in some time. Its eroticism is not just incidental but central, suffusing the lives of the besotted pair in whose voices it is told. John Chambers is a wealthy, utterly self-absorbed intellectual, devoted to Nietzsche, elaborate wordplay (he constantly employs words that are not even in the dictionary) and classical music, which echoes at all hours through his splendid SoHo loft. So lost inside his own head that he once even gave up speech, he has also abjured sex?until he meets the oddly named Clara Bell. In flight from a perverse family in California, Clara is the essence of promiscuity?though paradoxically virginal, having developed an extreme form of mutual masturbation that delights her many male companions. She is as deliberately unintellectual as John is cerebral (her passion is antique quilts, in which she deals), but when they meet, and soon marry, they quite literally lose themselves in each other. The book takes place in the course of an evening and night Clara spends away on a mysterious errand. As John passionately awaits her return, he immerses himself in thoughts of her and later in her utterly frank diaries?and he has the strangest encounter with a Chinese-food delivery man. Landis brilliantly catches the two very distinct voices of John and Clara?he's an egghead; she's impulsive, pragmatic, funny?and the reader quickly becomes enmeshed in the dreamily concupiscent atmosphere of their partnership, in which audacious sexuality is the norm. There will be those who object to a scene that seems to have strayed in from Bret Easton Ellis, and the denouement is tricky rather than inevitable; but Lying in Bed exerts an almost hypnotic attraction and offers some genuine insights?discomforting, exultant, even comic?into the power of sex. 25,000 first printing; major ad/promo.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This nearly plotless novel takes place in the course of one evening while John Chambers waits for his wife Clara to return home from a mysterious appointment. Chambers's musings on his marriage, accompanied by excerpts from Clara's diaries, take the reader on a voyeuristic trip through a tangled web of desire, obsession, and (perhaps) a murder, in which overly erudite references to music, philosophy, and literature are served up with a goodly amount of the joys of sexual self-pleasure. A self-conscious, ostentatiously literary style and a narcissistic, unlikeable narrator will limit the appeal of this first novel to confirmed lovers of erotica. Those hunting for a combination of The Story of O and The Bridges of Madison County should look no further. Buy accordingly.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (January 6, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156512068X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565120686
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,637,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intricately woven tale of a NY man waiting for his wife, June 8, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Lying in Bed (Hardcover)

Consider a man, independently wealthy, who has nothing to do all day but wander the streets of New York with a walkman blaring his blessed classical music. He meets a woman by deciphering her handwriting. Suddenly, he is alive. This book is a journey through the mind of a man waiting for his wife to come home from a dinner engagement, and the thoughts with which he amuses himself for the evening. It is a beautiful story