FLIEGELMAN'S DESIRE - Softcover

Lewis Buzbee's writing has appeared in Harper's, GQ, Paris Review, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Fliegelman works a boring job. His is an untrustworthy existence in which the days conspire against him and the city park acts as their accomplice; moreover, the surreal, purposeful world plots to thwart him from attaining or even understanding his "desire." His desire, a vague longing, at first directed at his former wife, soon becomes disembodied, achieving a mystical status. He attempts to follow strangers to gather up bits of their leftover desire. He quits his dull office for a bookstore position, where he can observe people desiring books. He meets Mimi, another student of desire, and they have an affair that leads the plot into some rapid, bizarre twists and an ending that doesn't quite live up to the rest of the story. This is Buzbee's first novel and he has taken on a difficult subject. The writing, though usually focused and descriptive, sometimes wanders into sophomoric metaphysics, such as "He told her that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he really knew." But Buzbee, a sales rep for Chronicle Books, has a playful imagination and a charming way of animating the ordinary: "The books fit the hands well, as if they jumped into the hands, as if the thumb's opposable purpose."
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