Kissing in Manhattan - Hardcover

Schickler, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385335660 ISBN 13: 9780385335669

Publisher: The Dial Press, 2001

Synopsis

Hilarious, sexy, and deeply tender, Kissing in Manhattan follows a troupe of love-hungry urbanites through a charmed metropolis and into the Preemption -- the mythic Manhattan apartment building readers first discovered when The New Yorker debuted David Schickler's stunning short story "The Smoker."

Now, in Schickler's eagerly anticipated first book, the Preemption sets the stage for a romantic fantasy as exuberant, dark, and dazzling as the city it occupies. Behind closed doors, the paths of an improbable cast of tenants -- a seductive perfume heiress; a crabby, misunderstood actor; a preternaturally sharp-sighted priest -- tangle and cross, while a perilous love triangle builds around three characters:

James Branch, a shy young accountant with an unusual love for the Preemption's antique elevator, and a strange destiny...

Patrick Rigg, a Wall Street lothario who soothes his pain by seducing beautiful women, carrying a gun, and attending the nightly sermons of a foreboding priest...

Rally McWilliams, a fetching, hopeful young writer who roams the city at night, searching for the soulmate she believes in but can't find...

Charged with joy and a deadly sense of humor, Kissing in Manhattan is a daring new writer's vision of a world where men and women, good and evil, love and sex, meet, battle, and embrace on every street corner.

About this title

Review

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

From the Back Cover

“Forget mere sex and the city... Kissing in Manhattan features die-hard romantic strivers in a surreal turn-of-the-millennium New York ruled by the spirit of improbable happy endings.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Schickler has a wild, out-of-left-field dramatic imagination that’s really fresh. The way his characters take you, as well as one another, by surprise is terrific fun.”
— New York magazine

“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. ... Schickler is a fabulist for the 21st century, a skewed Scheherazade.”
— Publishers Weekly

“One of the most charming and memorable debuts this year is Kissing in Manhattan.... Tenderness and darkness are around every corner ... There are Gothic overtones, bits of magical realism, moments of true eroticism with hints of danger.... This tender, lovely book and these love-starved and hopeful individuals linger like a reader’s dream.”
— The New Orleans Times-Picayune

“With these wonderfully haunting, strange, and hilarious stories, David Schickler has established himself as a major new voice in American fiction.”
— Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Hitler's Niece

“Schickler’s playfully alive voice is uniquely his own — sprightly, exact, Herculean in all the fundamentals. What talent! From beginning to end, here you have some of the most pleasurable storytelling of this — or any — year.”
— Darin Straus, author of Chang and Eng

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385335660
• ISBN 13: 9780385335669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288