Customer Reviews

No Lease on Life: A Novel

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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

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.

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.

Ms. Tillman has once again created another memorable narrator and voice. NO LEASE ON LIFE is a remarkably quick read, rife with interesting characters and observations. I enjoyed the joke motif throughout the book. Clearly, the BIG JOKE is on anyone willing to live in NYC.

Ms. Tillman engages the reader through excellent narration, vivid descriptions, and developed characters. Simply a work of art.