This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity
of pre-gentrified New York.
The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a
boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with
crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up
along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos.
Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless
noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building
and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair
the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too
avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for
sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push
her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those
of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own.
Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an
avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and
unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always
illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in
America's toughest, hottest melting pot.
