Zoo Time
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Reading is over. Writing is finished. Publishing is dead. Embittered author Guy Ableman knows this, as does his desperate editor; as does the sad whole of doomed literary London. But Guy is dedicated to his dying art, and continues to write for an audience that doesn't exist, loathed by the few readers he does have - feminists who charge him with misogyny, mothers who accuse him of hating children.His vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and often blazingly angry, is another source of pain, as is her alluring mother Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence. And Guy is, from the off, as captivated by his mother-in-law as he is by his wife... Against a backdrop of disappointment, failure and loss, in a world in which food and fashion have long since trampled fiction into the ground, Guy is consumed with the temptation of an illicit affair. It distorts every thought in his head, and becomes his next great novel. Fantasy blurs with reality in this furious, hilarious novel about love, loss, mothers and daughters. Frank, poignant and moving, Zoo Time is our funniest writer at his brilliant best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Man Booker Prize-winner Jacobson (The Finkler Question) returns with this smiling meta-look at a novelist struggling to find his next book in a world where there are more writers than readers (and where, "Whatever else, fiction was fucked.") Forty-three-year-old Guy Ableman's London publisher has committed suicide, and his new one is pushing "unbooks" for smart phones. His agent dismisses all of Guy's book proposals, most of which are inspired by Guy's efforts to seduce spirited, red-headed Poppy Eisenhower, whom Guy has longed for since marrying her spirited, red-headed daughter, Vanessa. As monkey-obsessed Guy attempts to go "zoo time" with the inseparable women, he "mouth-writes" novels about his alter-ego, Gid. Acknowledging that a writer who "resorts to writing about writing" is in trouble, Guy moves on to a protagonist based on his Casanova brother Jeffrey "who drinks vodka through his eyes" and whom Guy suspects (with lamentation) is sleeping with his wife, and postulates (with rage) is sleeping with Poppy. Mentally auditioning various novel ideas throughout The Monkey on My Back, The Mother-in-Law Joke, and The Monkey and the Mother-in-Law Guy moves closer to his next book, but never (even as Poppy and Vanessa change course) far from himself.
