Based upon Availability: A Novel - Softcover

Strauss, Alix

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061845264 ISBN 13: 9780061845260

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

“Like a beautifully-wrapped gift box, full of unexpected pleasures. Alix Strauss proves herself to be an astute and deeply feeling observer of human nature.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Black & White

A stunning, wise, and witty second novel from renowned trend journalist Alix Strauss, Based Upon Availability chisels away at the exteriors of eight smart and intriguing women while delving deep inside to see what they’re truly made of. Following her Ingram Award-winning The Joy of Funerals—named Best Debut Novel by The New York Resident—Based Upon Availability is women’s literary fiction at its finest.

About this title

About the Author

Alix Strauss is a lifestyle trend writer who appears on national morning and talk shows. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Time, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. She is the author of The Joy of Funerals, Have I Got a Guy for You, and Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious.

From the Back Cover

From the very first page of this stunning novel, readers are drawn into the lives of eight seemingly ordinary women who pass through Manhattan's swanky Four Seasons Hotel. While offering sanctuary to some, solace to others, the hotel captures their darkest moments as they grapple with family, sex, power, love, and death.

Trish obsesses over her best friend's wedding and dramatic weight loss. Robin wants revenge after a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her older sister. Anne is single, lonely, and suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Drug-addicted rock star Louise needs to dry out. Southerner turned wannabe Manhattanite Franny is envious of her neighbors' lives. Sheila wants to punish her boyfriend for returning to his wife. Ellen so desperately wants children that she insists she's pregnant to her disbelieving husband. And Morgan, the hotel manager—haunted by the memory of her dead sister—is the thread that weaves these women's lives together.

Reviews

Strauss's stellar first novel (after story collection The Joy of Funerals) chronicles the loneliness of New Yorkers loosely connected by the swanky Four Seasons hotel. Hotel manager Morgan, Strauss's strongest protagonist, longs for the company of her older sister, Dale, who died of leukemia as a child. She's in a go-nowhere relationship and hoping to find a friend in Trish Hemingway, an artist and gallery owner who reminds her of Dale. Trish, meanwhile, is coming to terms with growing apart from her best friend, and she's not fully over her fiancé, who left her shortly before they were to be married. Subplots play out and scenes are revisited courtesy of a number of perspectives—hotel employees, friends and family, hotel guests—creating a near mosaic with twinges of darkness, thanks largely to the strange and unexpected things that go on behind hotel doors: the s&m gear Morgan steals after snooping in a guest's room, an abused woman found tied to a bed. Strauss's ending, which strives to be hopeful, comes off as abrupt; otherwise, this is quite sublime.
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*Starred Review* The women in Strauss’ mesmerizing novel all suffer from an inability to connect with family, with men, with potential friends. Morgan, a 32-year-old manager at the upscale Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, is still devastated more than two decades after the death of her older sister Dale. Constantly wondering how her life would be different if her sister was still alive, and feeling closer to Dale than anyone living, Morgan resents that her parents have bottled up their grief in a way she can’t. At work, Morgan sneaks into random hotel rooms to swipe prescription meds and study the belongings of the hotel’s various patrons. Strauss gives readers a glimpse into the lives of the women whose paths Morgan crosses, from the aging rock star whose publicist checks her into the hotel in a last-ditch effort to get her to sober up, to the obsessive-compulsive hotel employee whose boyfriend commits the ultimate act of betrayal, to a decorator so desperate to get pregnant that she comes to believe she actually is. Lonely and longing to be otherwise, the characters in this moving novel are achingly sympathetic, their plights eminently relatable. --Kristine Huntley

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061845264
• ISBN 13: 9780061845260
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340