No Lease on Life [Hardcover]

Lynne Tillman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1998

A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, No Lease on Life is a “funny, frightening, and utterly brilliant tour de force” (Bay Area Reporter) of 24 unpredictable hours in the life of an urban resident. “As energetic and raunchy as a New York street” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck gettin' dirt 'n' gritty...." The Lovin' Spoonful's song might easily be the anthem for Elizabeth Hall, the protagonist of Lynne Tillman's fourth novel, No Lease on Life. Elizabeth lives in the hottest, grittiest city of all, New York, and Tillman's novel follows 24 hours in the life of this urban heroine. Unlike many novels set in New York's mean streets, Elizabeth is neither rich nor poor, and she isn't particularly alienated or particularly crazy; her charm lies precisely in her ordinariness; she's well educated, has a job, and lives with a boyfriend she loves in a rent-controlled apartment that she likes. Elizabeth even likes her neighborhood, the rundown drug-infested East Village, and has befriended a prostitute named Jeanine and a bag lady called Gisela among others. But lately the noise in the streets--the car alarms, the breaking glass, the relentless high-decibel hijinx of the junkies and dealers in the wee small hours of the morning--has been getting to her. Elizabeth can't sleep, and as she sits staring out her window at the "morons" below, violent fantasies flit through her head.

Readers expecting a buildup to shattering violence will be disappointed. Instead Tillman delivers a quirky, tough tale of a resilient woman having a bad day. When, at the end, Elizabeth takes a little naughty revenge on her tormentors, readers can rest assured that this slightly-frayed-around-the-edges heroine will live to fight another day.

From Kirkus Reviews

New Yorker Tillman (Cast in Doubt, 1992, etc.) returns to fiction after her recent book of essays (The Broad Picture, p. 939), vividly conveying a heat-maddened day and night in one woman's complex relationship with her East Village neighborhood, a junkie zone where everyone has an attitude and no one gets ahead. On her block, Elizabeth Hall is in the minority in more ways than one: She's white, well-educated, has a regular job, and she cares about her surroundings. While morons are cavorting down in the street during the wee hours, dumping trash cans and smashing windshields, she's up in her window watching and fantasizing about how she might kill them off. After her do-nothing landlord sends notice of a rent increase, Elizabeth responds to a neighbor's call to resist, successfully working the city bureaucracy until the landlord relents--a pyrrhic victory in light of the fact that there's still no lock on her building's front door to keep the junkies from shooting up (or even worse) in the hallways as they please. Meanwhile, as Elizabeth walks her street, she talks sympathetically with Jeanine the hooker and Gisela the crazy bag- lady, offering what consolation she can. But her sleepless nights, her dead-end job as a magazine proofreader, her relentlessly ironic boyfriend, and the shadow man who watches her from his window across the street as she finally takes action, firing eggs surreptitiously from her fire escape onto the heads of another band of troublemakers, add up to a life in which heroic action achieves the same result as treading water. Tillman's view of city life seen through the not-quite-jaded eyes of a determined survivor has its share of honest moments and rough humor, but too much familiar material and a steady stream of fair-to-weak jokes unmercifully dilute this fourth novel. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (January 19, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015100272X
• ISBN-13: 978-0151002726
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,496,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Here's an Author's Bio. It could be written differently. I've written many for myself and read lots of other people's. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction - selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me. Right now, I'm working on a novel, my sixth, and also some stories and will be working on an art essay or two soon.

In April, a new collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, will be pubbed by Red Lemonade Press. There is no story called Someday This Will Be Funny in it: it's a title that comments on all the stories, maybe.

Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.

I've lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He's also a wonderful man.

As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I'm inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.

When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don't know, have or haven't experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that's been written.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wicked Humor and Thrilling Talent, November 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: No Lease on Life: A Novel (Paperback)

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

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Lease on Life: It's good, February 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: No Lease on Life (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars There is no point in reading this book, April 6, 2001

By 

Marty Miller (Columbia, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Lease on Life: A Novel (Paperback)

This book is about nothing. But not the funny kind of nothing as in Seinfeld. If you read the back of this book, you get the impression that this woman takes revenge on the people in the streets making all the noise. Let me save you the suspense, she does NOTHING! All she does is complain complain complain, and in the end she finally loses it and, oh my, throws a few eggs out the window that don't even hit the perpetrators. They land on the street. Nothing is resolved at all, there's no plot, there's random jokes all through the book that start out corny and then become unneccessarily offensive and very inappropriate (since when are incest jokes funny?) not to mention annoying when you're trying to figure out why this book was even written. It's important to note that half of everything in this book never happens. It's all about what this woman "would do if..." and "then she would say..." Well,if I "would" have known that I'd gain nothing from reading this book, I "would" never have bought it in the first place.