Self-Reliance - Softcover

Brownstein, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890187 ISBN 13: 9781566890182

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1994

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The narrator, a freelance journalist, describes his isolated life in New York's East Village during the 1970s

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly:

Set in Manhattan in the mid-'70s, this involving novel examines the mind of a struggling writer who is either in the midst of uncovering a major conspiracy or going crazy. Narrator Roy is burnt-out from his work as a freelance music writer for low-paying publications and disillusioned after the senseless death of a musician friend. He lucks into an interview with reclusive 69-year-old novelist Oliver Hartwell and hopes to make enough money from it to take his artist girlfriend on a vacation--before she loses interest in their bohemian affair. At the end of a successful interview, Hartwell leaks that he plans to stop answering his phone and his mail, and intends to vanish. He promises to contact Roy for an exclusive afterward if what he has revealed so far remains unpublished. Desperate for money, Roy tries to sell the Hartwell story to Rolling Stone but returns home to find that someone has broken into his apartment and stolen the tapes, rendering the piece unusable. Roy gives up writing, eventually becoming a performance artist (his magnum opus being the kidnapping of a lawyer's wife from Scarsdale at gunpoint). He becomes increasingly convinced that Hartwell is orchestrating everything from graffiti to news items. If Roy's paranoia sometimes grates, Brownstein ( Music from the Evening of the World ) skillfully re-creates the 1970s setting, from happenings in a burgeoning SoHo to Gary Gilmore's execution and Anita Bryant's anti-homosexual campaign.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

New York City has long served as a literary crucible, yielding fiction taut with social satire and charged with competitiveness, danger, and frenzy. Brownstein, whose intensity is reminiscent of Paul Auster and Madison Smartt Bell, re-creates the sizzle and snap of the streets of Manhattan in the late 1970s when junkies ruled the Lower East Side, SoHo abruptly transformed itself from a shabby warehouse district into a real-estate developer's wet dream, and the psycho killer Son of Sam preyed on young women. Brownstein's hero, Roy, is a cynical and disconsolate journalist whose activity of choice is smoking dope and staring out the window. He's poised for disaster, and when it arrives, he finds himself confronting everything from self-destructive gay restaurateurs, an opportunistic gallery owner who wants him to turn his psychotic episodes into performance art, and a guerrilla army of street people and the elderly led by a famous author Roy once interviewed who went underground to pursue his battle against the ravages of old age and the mistreatment of seniors. Brownstein leaves us breathless with the insanity and brutality of this predatory realm and uncertain of the trustworthiness of Roy's desperate interpretations, but more than willing to suspend disbelief and soak up this wily and brilliantly created ambience. Donna Seaman

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.