Vincent and Alice and Alice
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the visionary author of Light Boxes, a mind-bending office comedy, and a touching modern love story set against the backdrop of an ever-increasingly disorienting America.
Being home all the time is depressing, so I tell my boss “I’m ready for anything” in the strongest conference call voice in the world while driving my hand into a family-sized bag of tortilla chips. Without a future, no Alice, I’m ready for an adventure.
Meet Vincent. After his divorce from Alice he’s lost his way, and is mindlessly working for the State, counting down the days till retirement. When his boss tells him to participate in a program that promises not only to increase productivity, but show him his “ideal life” he thinks: what’s the harm? Others have seen new marked improvements in productivity and personal happiness. Willing to try anything to move away from the heartbreak of Alice, Vincent reluctantly complies.
But what the program shows him, is that his ideal life is simply Alice. She’s back. Is she real? A clone? A hologram? Despite the lingering questions, Vincent eases back into love and begins to live his life again with Alice, that is, until the real Alice returns.
A novel about work, love, and how to live in the present moment, Vincent and Alice and Alice flings us through a shockingly funny and tender-hearted world just a few degrees different from our own, one that introduces us to a wild cast of characters, including the enigmatic CEO of PER, Dorian Blood, a mysterious under-cover cop, and the acid-tongued Elderly, a man living in his car who may be the only one who understands how to live in reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The narrator of Jones's uneven novel (after Crystal Eaters), an everyman named Vincent, is pushing 40 and nine years into a mind-numbing state job that will yield an exceptional retirement package as long as he stays for 30 years. He's recently divorced from his wife, Alice, an idealistic nonprofit worker who could no longer stand the banalities of their life together, no matter that Vincent is still in love with her. Unable to be fully present at work in the aftermath of the divorce, Vincent enters the mysterious Patrol for Everyday Repetition (PER) program, led by the enigmatic Dorian Blood. PER promises a way for Vincent "to live a fulfilling existence while being a productive worker." In other words, as Vincent embraces the monotony of capitalism, he will be rewarded by a tangible manifestation of his ideal life, which will eventually "overlap then blanket reality." For Vincent, all that means is having Alice back. Though PER initially seems to work, reality keeps intruding on Vincent's life: he loses his dog, his only friend goes missing, and finally the real Alice reappears. Jones is an imaginative writer, capable of astute observations about capitalism and desire, but the execution never quite lives up to the ambition of the concept. This is an entertaining effort, but it may leave some readers unsatisfied.
