Customer Reviews

Town House

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

You may never have had a panic attack like the ones that plague Jack Madigan, or found comfort by pretending to be a dog like Lucinda, the wise little girl who saves his soul in some important way, but you will feel as if you did when you read TOWN HOUSE. That's how powerfully these characters are drawn.

Read this novel because it is hilarious and unique; but more importantly, read it because underneath its quirky humor, it is poignant and true.

WARNING: It may also make you long desperately to live in a town house on Beacon Hill.

Town House is an amazing story by Toronto author Tish Cohen, whom I met in June with authors Patry Francis and Jennifer McMahon. Not only did Tish write her book in three and one half-weeks, (it WAS fully plotted - but, still - that is an amazingly fast write - even for a writer who writes, as Tish does - everywhere - (on the keyboard or on scraps of paper scrawled while grocery shopping) she soon sold Town House to Fox movies.

Ridley Scott has been signed as the producer; Doug Wright as the screenwriter.

Tish told me recently in an email that filming is slated to begin in Boston in January.

NEWS FROM THE AUTHOR, (Tish herself!)We've had some nice film news--John Carney, who directed the much-acclaimed indie film, ONCE, has signed on to direct Town House. ONCE won at Sundance, it's a great film that's getting a lot of Oscar buzz.

Tish has a fantastically creative and quirky style. That is one reason her book sold so quickly. Another reason? I have no idea. But hum a few bars for me or give me the recipe and I'll try my hand...Hmm. Maybe not. Tish is sui generis, a unique author with a unique story to tell.

On to Tish's book. Admittedly, an agoraphobic herself, Tish's main character, Jack Madigan, is also agoraphobic. He lives in the house his dead, rock-star legend father, Baz Madigan, left in his will.

(This fictional house and the cover of the book is a Boston Town House, the subject of the book. Once upon a time, Tish fell in love with Boston when she was here for a conference. She skipped the conference but toured Boston with its fabulous history, culture, and architecture.)

Like Jack's life, the house is a once-glorious enterprise now in near ruins. Yet, Jack is still way too good looking for his own good and is fast spending the inheritance from his father's royalties. However, in Town House, like in real life, once the money runs out, it becomes time to pay the piper. Jack must negotiate his way through many characters in this fast-paced story. The bank is threatening to foreclose; the ex-wife wants to take their son to California - and a maddening girl next door keeps barging in on his life. Then there is the matter of the real estate agent.

So Jack turns to his ingenuity to save his mortgage, his sanity and his son. And to venture out into the real world beyond his front door. This is a comic read in the best sense - zany characters who seem too nutsy to be real and yet they are characters you recognize as your own neighbors (or, possibly as yourself).

* * *

Excerpt:

This is from the Prologue:

"The pills clung to the bottom of Baz's dry tongue like barnacles. He held his breath, waiting for the nurse's tyrannical bosom to swing away and lead her downstairs, toward the street where her teenage son was waiting, or honking rather, in his shiny new '78 Pinto.

"Swallow," said the nurse, narrowing her eyes.

He opened his mouth to show his empty tongue. "Were you always this bossy?" One of the pills struck the underside of his tongue stud.

"Only with the sneaky ones."

The Pinto beeped again.

"Go ahead, Louisa." Baz's words hung, wafer-thin and dusty, in the stale air of his bedroom. He closed his eyes and swallowed, sending trickles of pain across his temples and down his neck. "I'm going to sleep until Francine comes up with my dinner."

"How that fine woman ever birthed a wretch like you, I'll never know." She gathered his mane into a loose ponytail and stuffed it down his T-shirt. "Your hair smells nice today."

Baz cracked one eye open as she lifted the leather jacket from his shoulders and replaced it with a soft guilt. Having assured himself she wasn't mocking him, he glanced up to admire the giant Bazmaniacs logo on the back of the battered jacket as she hung it on a chair - right next to his Fender Stratocaster electric guitar and three framed gold records."

And from Chapter 1:

" Jack Madigan squeezed his eyes shut. Hard. He wasn't going to cry over this. There were exactly three events in his thirty-six-year-old memory that had brought him to tears, typically life-splintering events; such as his father dying on him while he was away at a sleepover; his son, Harlan, bursting - squalling an bawling - out of the womb and into his heart; and his ex-wife sashaying out the front door of the old Boston town house and wishing Jack a good life.

She'd forgotten the tweezers."

* * *

So will Jack be able to find love? Save his house and child? Venture outside into the real world? All that will become evident in the final chapters of this MUST read!

This book is hilarious! I could not stop laughing throughout the book. I definitely recommend it to everyone! Enjoy!

Town House was such a great read...I had to use all my willpower to not read it in one sitting, and still it was done in three days! Tish Cohen's characters were all so wonderfully quirky - she really gave them each a unique voice, something other authors often fall short of. Now that I'm done with the book, I find myself missing the characters and wishing there was some kind of sequel I could pick up now. This really is a great novel that I think speaks to all audiences - Tish Cohen beautifully captured the anxiety, ambivalence, and inner struggles of a main character that we can all empathize with.

Awesome! A great book! I just turned the last page and am ready to flip to cover and start over again.

Tish Cohen's book, Town House, is one of the best books I have read in a very long time. The characters are hilarious, endearing, and real.

Town House is an amusing, sensitive, frank look at one man's struggle with the harsh realities of life, yet the entire time I was reading I felt uplifted, encouraged, and completely entertained. The characters Cohen created came to life for me, and I looked forward to spending time with them every day. This is one of those rare books that left me sad when I finished because I won't being seeing my friends anymore...well, at least not until the movie comes out - I can't wait.

Any fan of John Irving's or Anne Tyler's will quickly become a fan of Tish Cohen's!

This is a must read.

Town House by Tish Cohen is a light, funny, interesting novel about how our man, Jack Madigan, a famous rockstar's only son, deals with hurt and painful memories he can't leave, can't escape and seems to not want to. He is locked into the town house with them, and this he does completely willingly, except for his problem, he is an agoraphobic (no that does not mean a fear of spiders). He is completely unable to go outside without taking a heavy medication, which lately isn't even doing the trick. Jack's time in the town house is father left him is coming to an end, he needs to sell the house since he is not keeping up with the payments. Will he be able to leave the house and find a job? Will he be able to keep his house?

Two women in his life push and shove him to break through his fears( his naive Realtor, and his precocious neglected 8-year-old next door neighbor girl), but he constantly lets them down. He can't help them if they are standing outside his house, and how can a friendship stand strong when it seems so one-sided at times?His son Harlan, an amazing kid with a true loving heart, is slowly loosing hope for his father. He is a teen, a teen should not be seen with a father who cannot leave the house except to get dizzy, create a scene and embarrass his son (or so Harlan thinks!!!)

Well, read it!! Town House is a perfect book that is not as silly as chick lit, and has much more substance...but it also is very funny. Jack the main character is full of sarcasm, and he will draw you right in, and you will love him, at least I do. So, if you are looking for a book in between reading Tolstoy and Henry James, this is it. The quality is there, the lightness and humor are there as well, and yet it is completely quirky and real. Dive in!

Quotes from the book:

" No, the rood of your problem lies in your lack of a stable childhood home. Lack of parenting. Lack of a solid family life. Your father was and obsessive -compulsive with olfactory issues who left you to sleep in a Coca-Cola crate" (p. 21).

" Harlan would be much better off with his mother, Jack thought. Hell, he'd be better off with this Yale guy, who takes all the vitamins. Only the most selfish of fathers wouldn't see this" (p. 62).

"This house has turned you into a prisoner. It being sold is, like the best thing that could ever happen to you. And me! Let's get the hell out of it!" (p. 81).

"It was all so delicate, so temporary, this thing called life. One minute this was your world; the next minute it was gone" (p. 249).

My mother heard I was thinking of moving into a Boston townhouse, and she sent me this book as a sort of warning, for Tish Cohen lays out all too clearly the perils of getting settled into a town house, no matter how spacious and airy. In this way, the book is rather like the forthcoming Dale Peck novel, in which a young boy who inherits an entire New York brownstone mansion, soon finds himself climbing the walls with loneliness (THE GARDEN OF LOST AND FOUND). Cohen's treatment is rather different, for she mixes the whimsical with the deadly and dangerous disease (or neurosis I suppose) people call "agoraphobia," where you never want to go outside. Jack Madigan has it made, the son of a famous rock star, and the father of a handsome teenage son Harlan, he has it all on the outside, but for him, there is no outside, it is a spooky and unimaginable world to which, as it happens, he has now lost his lovely wife Penelope who, or so it seems from the outset, has just about given him up for there are some people who just don't understand those of us who hesitate before lesving the house.

I heard the author of SEABISCUIT, Laura Hillebrand, recommend this book on one of those NPR radio chat shows where famous authors give tips on what's new and deserving. Hillebrand, as many know, herself is a real life victim of agoraphobia and despite that she did what Tish Cohen has done, built up a whole world out of a place where she has never been.

If asked what the book is like, I would pause and then reply that it is sort of a cross between ABOUT A BOY and PANIC ROOM. It would be a great movie with Hugh Grant and Jodie Foster! And some cute little girl like the one who played Foster's daughter in PANIC ROOM. There's also a good part for a realtor, someone like oh, Thelma Ritter used to play. Dorrie Allsop, the realtor in charge of selling the town house, provokes the crisis in Jack's life, by making him realize that even the safest refuge isn't always the best option in life. A funny chapter shows her perplexed when the ad she puts up describing the town house, that read, "Shelves in Cellar," is altered by the compositors so it looks like "She Lives in Cellar," and people reading the ad stop and say, "Who lives in the cellar?"

It's also a little bit like LOVE ACTUALLY (also with Hugh Grant), but with a Canadian twist. (Although set in the USA, it has some Canadian locutions that give it a strange, though welcome, freshness.

There's Jack, the agoraphobic son of a late rock star. Dorrie, the ditzy real estate agent whose strategy to try to sell a house is to point out its every flaw. Mrs. Brady, a one-eyed male cat. Lucinda, the girl next door who dreams of becoming an ice skater and barges into Jack's kitchen--and life. These are the characters who populate Town House, Tish Cohen's debut novel.

But Ms. Cohen has done more than simply give us a bunch of quirky characters trying to make the best in less than favorable circumstances. She makes the reader care for them--as flawed as they are. Lucinda is one of the loveliest and most unforgettable characters of any book I've read in a very long time--she made me laugh, she almost made me cry, and at the end I was sorry to say goodbye to her.

Town House is the rare thing: a novel that makes you laugh, breaks your heart, and remains with you long after you've read the last page.

I don't really get the enormous popularity of this book. I started reading this book because Tish Cohen had experienced such a huge success with it in terms of getting a movie contract, a big name publisher, etc. right after writing this book. However, I was very disappointed! Maybe I expected too much (or I didn't quite know what to expect) from a book that is self-professed "commercial fiction" as opposed to "literary fiction." What this book really is, is a movie in words. The characters are interesting and memorable in a "cute" and predictable kind of way, like a feel-good popcorn movie. There is no deep exploration of human nature or any kind of serious realism. I'd rather wait for the movie than read this book, because having read it, I don't feel I got more out of it than I would have out of a 2-hour movie on the same topic.

Gee I have started this one several times and just can't seem to get into it. I should not have listened to the other reviews! It's very slow and boring!