Product Description: Meet the denizens of New York City: artists, prostitutes, saints, and seers. All are aspiring toward either fame or oblivion, and hoping for love and acceptance. Instead they find high rents, faithless partners, and dead-end careers. But between the disappointments come snatches of self-awareness, and astrange beauty in their encounters with one another.
Amazon.com Review: In Tama Janowitz's story collection of mid-1980s manners, it's all about real estate. Her coterie of New York artists and grad students, junkies and collectors dwells in walk-ups and covets lofts. The occasional socialite wafts through, characterized tersely by statements of fact; for example, "Millie owned her own co-op." But, for the most part, these are the also-rans of Manhattan life, literally looking for a toehold in the city. The main character who emerges is shabby Eleanor, an appealing heroine who appears in several linked stories. A jewelry maker, she lives with an artist named Stash and a treasure-trove of insecurities. Much is made of the squalor of their apartment. In Eleanor, Janowitz finds a channel for her vulnerability--a nice counterpoint to her affectless prose, which attempts and occasionally achieves a deadpan humor.
Intertwined with the Eleanor stories are the unreliable first-person narratives of Marley Mantello. Marley, too, has serious real estate issues: "My apartment, the sublet from which I was being evicted, looked just as terrible as when I had gone out earlier--worse, even, for there was a foul reek of something fecund and feline, like the stench of old lion spoor upon the veldt."
The rest of the stories are brief thumbnails, which Janowitz calls "modern saints" and "case histories." Stabbing at experimentalism, they showcase her shortcomings--the lazy satire, the easy laugh. This author's prose seemed of-the-moment when it came out, and time has not been altogether kind. "I was startled to find him so far uptown, knowing how he usually refused to travel above Fourteenth Street, claiming it led to mental decay," says the narrator of "In and Out of the Cat Bag." This kind of observation may have seemed edgy in 1985, but has little staying power. At its best, Slaves effervesces a bittersweet nostalgia for a time when artists could still afford to live in Manhattan. --Claire Dederer
I must really be missing something Let me start off saying that I am a huge fan of the "brat pack" of literature, I have read every Bret Ellis at least twice, every Jay McInerney, and Mark Lindquist. Tama Janowitz should never be mentioned in the same breath as any of these authors.
I will admit that the furthest I've gotten in "Slaves" is about halfway through. I have had it for a couple years and have tried to read it at least 10 times. There is absolutely nothing appealing about Tama's writing style. It is uninteresting, and overall corny (the title should have been a tip off to this in retrospect) and I really cannot find anything redeeming about any aspect of any of the stories, characters, dialog, anything. Everything reads like it was ripped off, or perhaps others have ripped-off Janowitz and somehow made her annoying, loathsome drivel into something at least humorous or interesting.
I'm not saying I could do better, or that I'm a literary scholar, but I do feel that I am quite familiar with Janowitz's genre and, after wasting $15 and a few collective hours over the past year, I am equally baffled by all of the praise this novel receives and Janowitz's consistent inclusion in an otherwise outstanding period of literary commentary.
Your teen should read this BEFORE they screw-up. New Yorkers vs New York. Required reading for every social studies student. The title is a perfect description of the contents. Desperate people in desperate situations do desperate things. Life is hard, wear a helmet. To do is to be. Plato To be is to do. Socrates To be or not to be. Shakespeare Shew be do be do... Sinatra If you like this book try the book "Go Ask Alice". If you like this book try the movie "Go Ask Alice". If you like this book try the movie "Going South".
I must be missing something Maybe it's because I was born in the 80's and not partying then, or maybe I'm just too middle-class, but I thought this entire book was pretty mediocre. The characters were interesting, but usually I felt like the author was trying too hard to make them interesting. Janowitz fits in with the Bret Easton Ellis/Jay McInerney style of writing about what it's like to be incredibly spoiled and have no soul. The two aforementioned authors pull that off with a lot more style and ability than she does.
I only read this book because I heard that the character of Stash is in Ellis' book American Psycho. Overall, I found myself interested in the stories and the characters, but most of the stories lacked a certain human aspect that the other two authors know how to provide. This is a good read if you're stuck in an airport all day with nothing else, otherwise I'd recommend getting something with more substance.
Mimi and Strickland hit New york Interlinked stories about Greenwich Village artists in the 1980's. The shades of "Trilby" "La Boheme" and "The Moon and Sixpence" hover. The word `deadpan" was used by other reviewers and is very appropriate to the way shocking behaviors are described without an authorial nod or wink . The characters are eccentric or bizarre, in the traditional mode of starving artists. People are monstrously vain or childlike with the narrator, even a first person narrator, abstaining from moral judgment, although esthetic ones abound. Janowitz never uses an adverb and the suffix "-ly" does not occur. A minor irrelevant problem re-reading my Washington Square trade paperback copy from 1987 was that it has the kind of binding misleadingly called "perfect" that causes the book to split apart.
Excellent adventure! Let me just start out by telling you all that this is one of my all-time favorite books. I first read this when I was a teenager, and I believe I felt a bit of a synergy with Tama Janowitz' stories in this book. This book captures a time in the 1980's when New York City was a bouncing, art-filled world. This book is actually a collection of short stories, and though they are fiction, if you have ever been around the art world or lived in New York City from the 1980's-on, you can probably see a little bit of yourself or some others in the stories of these fictitious characters. What's great about this book is that although many of the stories vary, main characters are created and focused upon. So, while one story may contain a character that is never heard again from in the book, other stories return back to some main characters. And, oh, what characters! From the depressed but creative Eleanor, who designs her own earrings and is unhappy with her relationship with up-and-coming artist Stash, to struggling artist Marley Mantello, and his tales of striving for greatness, whilst eating such things as 'eggplant-chocolate-chip ice cream'. Enjoy this book, it is a fiction book, very witty, and very creative. Tama Janowitz has a knack for writing novels about life in New York City, and other places. This is one of her best novels, as yet, and I look forward to more of her novels, in the upcoming future.
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