No Lease on Life

How best to begin a book chronicling the travails of life in a low-rent apartment complex? Obviously with the marauding jackasses who wake you up at 2:00 am as they joyously knock over trashcans, smash beer bottles and scream at one another. “I would kill them with a crossbow,” thinks Elizabeth, the plucky protagonist of that novel that spans just one day in a New York slum. Like any good biologist might, Tillman rigorously investigates every inch of Elizabeth’s ecosystem, from the absentee landlord who rules by decree through a missive sent care of the United States Postal Service to the man who is paid to keep the common area clean (but doesn’t) to Elizabeth’s co-workers at her (underpaid) job as a proofreader. Of course, due scrutiny is paid to Elizabeth’s fellow tenants, her own depressing life, and the assorted bums, drug addicts and lowlifes who haunt her block and, occasionally, her building. Tillman’s genius here is to evoke Elizabeth’s life through a day’s meandering thoughts, to tell her story in the process of evoking every last detail of her home. The result is by turns wry, savage, and poignant, a novel that lays bare all the depredations of an impoverished woman striving for something better, yet that still, somehow, offers optimism without sacrificing authenticity.