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Book Cover
Book
Author Jacobson, Howard.

Title Zoo time : a novel / Howard Jacobson
Edition First U.S. edition
Published New York : Bloomsbury, 2012

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  820.914 J175 A6/Z  AVAILABLE
Description 375 pages ; 25 cm
Contents Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them. Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn't expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn't. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book. By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love -- love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best
Summary In awe of his strikingly beautiful, highly strung wife and her equally volatile mother, novelist Guy Ableman finds his work persistently interrupted by their drama and dreams of squeezing out one more great book in spite of growing fears that reading is a cultural activity of the past
Analysis Black humor (Literature)
Notes Also published: London : Bloomsbury, 2012
Subject Authorship -- Fiction.
Black humor.
Romance fiction.
Mothers-in-law -- Fiction.
Novelists -- Fiction.
Wives -- Fiction.
Genre/Form Novels.
LC no. 2012007046
ISBN 160819938X
9781608199389
9781620402337 (paperback)