Chez Chance

Becoming a paraplegic after an accident, former telephone-wire repairman Frank Eastman finds himself in a decrepid motel near Disneyland, trying to come to terms with his life and a host of eccentric neighbors

Wry ontological insights and wonderfully odd yet evocative metaphors fill this witty, melancholic first novel about misfits adrift in Los Angeles and the rest of America. Unhappy in his native St. Louis, disaffected paraplegic Frank Eastman returns to L.A., where six months before, working as a tree-cutter for the phone company, he suffered the fall from atop a rat-infested palm tree that caused his paralysis. Fed up with the condescension of his well-meaning sister and full of bitter insights into the empty lifestyles of "enabled" people, Frank moves into the seedy Tradewinds motel, in the shadow of Disney's magic kingdom. There, among a shady cast of eccentrics and fellow malcontents, Frank wrestles with the implications of his personal predicament and with the conflicting, sometimes hallucinatory, realities of this strange milieu. Gummerman (author of the well-received short-story collection We Find Ourselves in Moontown) brings a keen critical eye to his exploration of America's fascination with the false. His lean but expressive prose is rich in imaginative figurative language, and the expansive philosophizing of his colorfully seamy characters is insightful and entertaining.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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