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Loading... The Tenants of Moonbloom (1963)by Edward Lewis Wallant
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Hilarious and way underappreciated. This is an eccentric cousin of Confederacy of Dunces; you know the type -- myriad partners, straddling the fence as it were, some messy business with a tax-dodge start-up, that one weird holiday when the tequila ghostwrote his version of middle school and what really happened at swimming practice. Yeah this is that off-shoot and it remains profound and side-splitting. no reviews | add a review
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Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can't even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young black writer modeled on James Baldwin. Moonbloom hears their cries of outrage and abuse; he learns about their secret sorrows and desires. And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives. Edward Lewis Wallant's astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Soon he becomes increasingly involved in their lives, caught up their squabbles. The buildings are squalid and his brother won’t spend money on maintenance. Norman soon takes matters into his own hands and engages in a frenzy of cleaning, painting, tiling and plastering with the help of the slothful and underpaid super. Norman wants to make everything right in that little world and when his task is complete he knows he will be fired. ( )