Chez Chance (California Fiction) - Softcover

Gummerman, Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520210808 ISBN 13: 9780520210806

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

A freak accident has left young Frank Eastman a paraplegic―a "wild card" who needs to "pair up with someone or something or he won't pass back into existence." Los Angeles, the scene of his accident, is where he imagines this existence to be. He settles into a rundown motel near Disneyland, his neighbors a wild assortment of eccentrics who, though more able-bodied than Frank, have learned the effectiveness of willful inability. What Frank learns from them, in magnificently odd and mesmerizing conversations, will leave him as transformed emotionally as he has been physically with a narrative at once ironic, hilarious, and poignant.

About this title

About the Author

Jay Gummerman is the author of the short story collection We Find Ourselves in Moontown (1990). He lives in San Clemente, California.

From Booklist

Gummerman's first novel is a brief, elliptical, mordantly funny traipse through the fringes of Disneyland. A paraplegic ironically named Eastman seeks a fresh start. Yet he is not really seeking. Too enervated spiritually and physically for the usual effort of living, he instead ekes out an adventure as only a bystander strapped in a wheelchair could, submitting to transport from home in St. Louis, Missouri, to the zany vagaries of entertainment in L.A., where he lived before an accident crippled him. Holed up in a hard-luck motel near the Disney theme park, Eastman encounters and re-encounters a trail of oddball, sometimes threatening Altmanesque characters; events overtake him; he seems to be the loser; and yet ultimately he escapes, catching a bus to an unknown, nominally promising, new destination. An Alice-in-Wonderland aura shields the story from too many doubts or questions about the line possibly separating fantasy from real life. This is satire that reinvents its object, mauling the misery of American down-and-outers, "able" and disabled, with an appealing delicacy. The writer's cynical jabs at moral mobility will be tonic for anyone who's had it with the cliche{‚}s of recovery. But the book is also guardedly optimistic, bounding along on the strength of its intelligence. Gummerman is like a perverse "facilitator" : he forces us to be critical of our own culture. Molly McQuade

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520210808
• ISBN 13: 9780520210806
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 211