- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback (Aug 27 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385335679
- ISBN-13: 978-0385335676
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14 x 1.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 236 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (103 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #179,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
David Schickler's debut seems at first to be a lot of fun: a gaggle of young Manhattanites with fancy jobs and fine educations chase each other around town, falling in love or not. In a series of linked stories, Schickler gives us a perverted heiress; a bumbling schoolteacher whose teenage student proposes marriage to him; a bad comic who finds his métier in off-off-Broadway theater. The writing is cool and a bit willfully naive: "Rally McWilliams was profoundly lonely," begins the title story. "She wanted to believe that she had a soul mate, a future spouse gestating somewhere in Nepal or the Australian Outback. But in Manhattan, where Rally lived, all she found were guys."
The mood turns dark, however, with the introduction of Patrick, a thirtysomething Wall Street trader who collects women and spends his evenings tying them up in his room. In short order the book's easy comedy is torqued into something more dramatic by Patrick's descent into violence. That Schickler doesn't play to his strengths is not necessarily a bad thing: one admires a writer who reaches beyond facility to something more difficult. But the transition from lighthearted sexual ronde to dirty realism is a bit bumpy. On the other hand, the novel's picture of a dark, desire-ridden Manhattan is an attractively seductive slice of escapism. The linked-stories format gives rise to a feeling of multiplicity, which is just the right tone for a book about a city crowded with pleasures. Describing James, a love-struck young accountant, Schickler writes: "His mind tonight was on the fine and the illicit pleasures of the planet, on their merits and dispersement. Some people cut daisies, thought James. Some visit Wales, or choose cocaine, or dig latrines for the poor and the weak." Everyone, it seems, is after something different. But it's desire itself that interests the author of Kissing in Manhattan. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Like figures in a strange, spiky, urban frieze, the characters of Schickler's striking debut novel-in-stories pose, strut and cross paths in a darkly romantic, surreal Manhattan. Their geographic ground zero is the Preemption, a Gothic apartment building equipped with an ageless doorman and a venerable 19th-century elevator. On the premises, a devoted wife bathes her timid husband nightly, a headstrong Princeton-bound high school girl proposes marriage to her English teacher, and a perfume heiress humbles a cruel lawyer. Elsewhere, at a few select haunts, a failed comedian earns celebrity status as an angry mouse in a stage play, a smart feminist is seduced by a muscle-car-driving chauvinist named Checkers, and a travel writer searches for the particular something that makes people wonderful. At the dangerous center of the eclectic cast is Patrick Rigg, a 33-year-old stockbroker who unleashes pent-up childhood rage by recruiting a devoted harem of young women and making them fall in love with their own bodies. Rigg brings most of the characters together for the Millennial Solstice Debauchery Spree, a 10-day bacchanal headquartered in the Preemption. But celebration gives way to terror when Rigg discovers that his favorite woman none other than the travel writer, Rally McWilliams has fallen for Rigg's roommate, introvert accountant James Branch. Narrated in a deliberately artless (and occasionally just plain flat) deadpan, the narrative draws its strength from the puzzle-like maze of its intersecting plots and its menagerie of characters with Dickensian names and modern sensibilities. Schickler is a fabulist for the 21st century, a skewed Scheherazade. Though there are thin spots in the web he weaves, his imagination and passion promise much. First serial to the New Yorker.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Donna didn't want to meet Checkers. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
Donna didn't want to meet Checkers. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful Surprise,
By A Customer
This review is from: Kissing in Manhattan (Paperback)
What a great book! Kissing in Manhattan opens up with no promise particularly and then turns into an absolute page-turner when the web unfolds. The plot is random at first with a lot of play in character description and analysis. Afterwards when reader finds him/herself questioning if they have seen this character before - it turns out they are all linked either by residence or by association to an apartment block in Manhattan. It's hard to give a plot description of this book without giving the game away (is there a plot anyway one may ask?) -what ultimately unfurls is a robust observation of a series of weird and quite wonderful people that fill Manhattan's streets in some way. Embroiled in the plot is a realization of peoples hopes, fears, desires, family problems, first (and last) loves and reasons why they cannot/ will not love. Although each chapter is linked and entwined by some element of blackness or even 'black' comedy - the reader is left with a sense of hope and 'urban' salvation for all these amazing characters and, in fact, humankind. Many chapters in the book (and one character in particular)remind me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho - see what you think but any character remotely like that is BOUND to be interesting! Read this book, it's a little out of the ordinary - but it's worth it and you'll like it! Another odd little Amazon quick-pick I recommend is The Losers Club by Richard Perez
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Totally Bizarre and Delightfully Kinky,
By Jon J. Warren "jjnca" (LA, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Kissing in Manhattan (Paperback)
I loved the idea of linked short stories working as a novel -- "Slaves of New York" is one of my favorites books, so I was glad when a friend recommended this book to me as a sort of bizarre episode of "Sex and the City" -- all of the stories in this book revolve around the residents of a particular Manhattan apartment building and by "linking" the stories, Schickler turns them into a novel. Individually the stories are very well written and delightfully twisted -- there is "Telling it All to Otis," about the guy whose best friend is the old elevator in the building, and "Serendipity," about the young woman who seduces her co-worker, strips him of his clothes, and then humiliates him by locking him out in the hallway. The art of Schickler's prose is that he is able to pinpoint his character's quirkiness through a variety of methods, be it dialogue, character details, or by placing his oddballs in unlikely settings. My favorite running thread in the book involved the high school teacher and his gorgeous student, whose courtship is detailed in "The Smoker," one of the best written stories in the book. The only drawback for me was connecting with the adult character of Patrick Rigg, the dark, kinky millionaire, whose running thread sends all the plot lines into their strange denouement (though "Duty," which recounts the tale of Patrick's youth is a real beauty of comedy and pathos). Schickler is a terrifically talented writer and I am looking forward to reading more of him.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
this is great!,
By
This review is from: Kissing in Manhattan (Paperback)
At first it seems a little disjointed -- various characters, all living in Manhattan, most of them in an old building called the Preemption, built in the 1890s, each with their own private psychosis/neurosis. After a while, however, a plotline linking all of these characters emerges.There is the 31-year-old private school teacher whose student's parents want him to marry her. There is Jasper, who wanted to be a comedian like his grandfather and instead makes his stage debut as an angry giant mouse. There is Jeremy who is so shy but is actually the most interesting (he gets the most short stories devoted to him.) There is also the chilling Patrick, Jeremy's roommate, who likes to dress up women and tie them up, but not sleep with them, in an effort to dull the pain of seeing his brother die in an absurd manner as a child. (The fact that he has the same name and manner as the character in "American Psycho" probably made him really scary to me.) Oddly enough, Patrick goes to church to see one particular priest, who of course has his own story. I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading more from this author.
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