Chez Chance.

Berkeley, CA University of California Press, 1997. Paperback First Ed thus; First Printing indicated. First Ed thus; First Printing indicated. Fine in Wraps: binding square and secure; text clean. Virtually 'As New'. NOT a Remainder. NOT a Book-Club Edition. NOT an Ex-Library copy. 8vo. 211pp. (California Fiction Series). Trade Paperback. Wry ontological insights and wonderfully odd yet evocative metaphors fill this witty, melancholic first novel about misfits adrift in Los Angeles and the rest of America. Unhappy in his native St. Louis, disaffected paraplegic Frank Eastman returns to L.A., where six months before, working as a tree-cutter for the phone company, he suffered the fall from atop a rat-infested palm tree that caused his paralysis. Fed up with the condescension of his well-meaning sister and full of bitter insights into the empty lifestyles of "enabled" people, Frank moves into the seedy Tradewinds motel, in the shadow of Disney's magic kingdom. There, among a shady cast of eccentrics and fellow malcontents, Frank wrestles with the implications of his personal predicament and with the conflicting, sometimes hallucinatory, realities of this strange milieu. Gummerman (author of the well-received short-story collection We Find Ourselves in Moontown) brings a keen critical eye to his exploration of America's fascination with the false. His lean but expressive prose is rich in imaginative figurative language, and the expansive philosophizing of his colorfully seamy characters is insightful and entertaining.