The Review of Contemporary Fiction

No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman
Elisabeth Sheffield

Lynne Tillman. No Lease on Life. Harcourt Brace, 1998. 179 pages. $21.00.

The rigorously close, third-person narration in No Lease on Life allows for neither editorializing commentary nor the evasions of an “I.” Rather, what the reader gets is something like an inventory of consciousness. Patiently, meticulously, the narrative observes a woman’s mind over twenty-four hours one day in June, and records all the “garbage” that mind collects—“all the details, the sidewalk antics”—garbage which only adds to the heap of refuse within, all the experiences and cultural detritus of a lifetime. Just as Elizabeth Hall’s excrementally dirty apartment building (human shit sits in the vestibule for half the book) is overseen by a superintendent who can’t bear to throw away any of “life’s filth,” so the novel is presided over by a consciousness that cannot tear itself away from or disregard the street, the endless night, the darkness both within and without.
And herein lies one of the major virtues of Tillman’s novel. In a society that increasingly deals with the unbearable by cleaning “it” up, by sweeping the streets and parks of the homeless and addicted, and/or stashing “it” away (in ghettos, prisons, etc.), No Lease on Life provides a straight-on view and acknowledgment of the unbearable, if not an acceptance. What Elizabeth collects keeps her from sleeping, drives her to thoughts of murder, and yet “she [has] to be open . . . like a window . . . sometimes transparent, usually paradoxical, and always open to tragicomic views of life.”
As that last phrase hints, another great virtue of this novel is its humor. Perhaps inspired by Freud’s maxim that “we can only laugh when a joke has come to our aid,” Tillman has strewn and even obstructed the path of the narrative with dirty jokes and riddles. Seemingly outside and even superfluous to what I described above as an inventory of a woman’s consciousness (since Elizabeth never reflects on them), the jokes nevertheless inform our reading of this inventory—occasionally underscoring its themes, but more often simply helping us to hear better its own hilariously deadpan rhythms, to perceive more fully its “tragicomic view.” [Elisabeth Sheffield]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman Elisabeth Sheffield Lynne Tillman. No Lease on Life. Harcourt Brace, 1998. 179 pages. $21.00. The rigorously close, third-person narration in No Lease on Life allows for neither editorializing commentary nor the evasions of an “I.” Rather, what the reader gets is something like an inventory of consciousness. Patiently, meticulously, the narrative observes a woman’s mind over twenty-four hours one day in June, and records all the “garbage” that mind collects—“all the details, the sidewalk antics”—garbage which only adds to the heap of refuse within, all the experiences and cultural detritus of a lifetime. Just as Elizabeth Hall’s excrementally dirty apartment building (human shit sits in the vestibule for half the book) is overseen by a superintendent who can’t bear to throw away any of “life’s filth,” so the novel is presided over by a consciousness that cannot tear itself away from or disregard the street, the endless night, the darkness both within and without. And herein lies one of the major virtues of Tillman’s novel. In a society that increasingly deals with the unbearable by cleaning “it” up, by sweeping the streets and parks of the homeless and addicted, and/or stashing “it” away (in ghettos, prisons, etc.), No Lease on Life provides a straight-on view and acknowledgment of the unbearable, if not an acceptance. What Elizabeth collects keeps her from sleeping, drives her to thoughts of murder, and yet “she [has] to be open . . . like a window . . . sometimes transparent, usually paradoxical, and always open to tragicomic views of life.” As that last phrase hints, another great virtue of this novel is its humor. Perhaps inspired by Freud’s maxim that “we can only laugh when a joke has come to our aid,” Tillman has strewn and even obstructed the path of the narrative with dirty jokes and riddles. Seemingly outside and even superfluous to what I described above as an inventory of a woman’s consciousness (since Elizabeth never reflects on them), the jokes nevertheless inform our reading of this inventory—occasionally underscoring its themes, but more often simply helping us to hear better its own hilariously deadpan rhythms, to perceive more fully its “tragicomic view.” [Elisabeth Sheffield]

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