Like many writers, I feel centered when I write, or it might be better to say, when I don’t write, when I can’t write for whatever reason, I feel, frankly, de-stabilized. It’s dangerous for me not to write.
—
Sigrid Nunez
Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life by Betsy Sussler
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
- Elizabeth Murray by Jessica Hagedorn
- Kerry James Marshall by Calvin Reid
- Michael Winterbottom by Liza Béar
- Wong Kar-wai by Han Ong
- Anthony Hecht by Daniel Anderson
- Olu Dara by Tracie Morris
- Martin Sherman by Sander Hicks
- Philip Kan Gotanda by David Henry Hwang
Interviews
- When Words Fail by David Clarkson
- Jason Rhoades by Saul Ostrow
- Matt Damon: Good Will Hunting by Mark Magill
- Carl Palazzolo: A Personal History of Italian Film by Betsy Sussler
Artists on Artists
- Randy Bradley by Jake Bohstedt
- Two Poems by Laura Mullen
- Dump by Padgett Powell
- Musuh Dalam Selimut: The Enemies in the Blanket by Lawrence Chua
- The Fiery Pantheon by Nancy Lemann
- Excerpt from Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
- A Widow’s Lament by Rade Panich
First Proof
- Frank Bidart: Desire by Robert Polito
- Javier Marías’s A Heart So White by Minna Proctor
- Helen Gee’s Limelight by Marvin Heiferman
- Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life by Betsy Sussler
- Susan Yankowitz’s Phaedra in Delirium by Elana Greenfield
- Zhang Yimou’s Keep Cool by Larry Gross
- Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Mimi Thompson
- Jeanette Barron and Timothy O’Grady by Suzan Sheman
- Adam Ross by Shirley Kaneda
- Michael Jensen by Rone Shavers
- Michael Reafsnyder by David Pagel
- Rivka Rinn by Roberto Juarez
- Jon Brion by Lance Loud
- Rickie Lee Jones’ Ghostyhead by Hilton Als
- Maria Flook’s My Sister Life by Amy Hempel
Editor's Choice
Lynne Tillman. Photo by Michel Delsol. Courtesy of Harcourt Brace.
Elizabeth, the audacious heroine of No Lease on Life, would like to murder, preferably by knife or strangulation—pleading temporary insanity—the crusty junkies and skinheads who inhabit her tenement street. Not the drug dealers, prostitutes, and small businessmen who work the street, they at least have a purpose. But as Tillman posits in her epigraph: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,/ for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).
Plagued by the homeless sleeping and defecating in her vestibule; yuppies shooting up in her hallway; the endless wail of sirens; late-night revelers; boom boxes and car alarms, Elizabeth’s droll tale of a white middle-class girl in New York City’s downwardly mobile slum recalls the humor of both Kafka and Woody Allen. Tillman’s secondary characters rant like Woody Allen’s while the novel’s tenants occupy an endless duration of poverty and a faceless, intransigent bureaucracy straight out of The Trial. It is no wonder that Elizabeth cannot sleep. Or that her proofreading job seems to be the only way she can effect any change, albeit with punctuation.
Tillman punctuates Elizabeth’s wry opinions with ethnic jokes so demeaning in their stereotypical assumptions, so dead on in the way we view each other, that they become quintessentially American. What the middle class wants to forget is where they’ve come from, what our self-deprecating unconscious, our jokes, reveal is that we cannot. Which in the end is what this wonderfully eccentric and witty novel does so well. Like the other America, the land of the trapped, desperate, and destitute, it haunts us at every turn.
—Betsy Sussler
No Lease on Life will be published by Harcourt Brace in February.
Related
In echoes and splices of “narrative sonic bites,” Douglas sets her experimental novel, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, to the dub pulse of Rasta tradition.
Let’s begin with death. “Let’s say that in the course of all human experience, death is pure conjecture: it is, as such, not an experience. And all that which is not an experience is useless to mankind.” The speaker here is Ledesma, one of a cadre of lovelorn, thoroughly chauvinistic doctors up to no good at a sanatorium just outside Buenos Aires.
What kind of novel would you write if you had never read a novel before? Would it have the mounting tension of a campfire tale? The breathless cadence of fresh gossip shared with a best friend? If you’re Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug, you unspool 50,000 words with the inventiveness of Scheherazade and the guilelessness of a Red Bull–fueled, hyperarticulate ten-year-old. This is Wait, Blink.
Originally published in
BOMB 62,
Winter 1998
Featuring interviews with Elizabeth Murray, Kerry James Marshall, Anthony Hecht, Michael Winterbottom, Liza Bear, Wong Kar-Wai, Olu Dara, Martin Sherman, and Philip Kan Gotanda.
