High Maintenance - ISBNLookup.com

From Barnes & Noble

Jennifer Belle’s ribald sense of humor and twisted view of human nature made Going Down one of the most talked about debuts in recent years. With High Maintenance, a hilarious tale of one urban woman’s struggle to survive divorce, Belle ensures herself a place among our grittiest -- and wittiest -- young writers. After her wealthy husband cheats on her, Liv Kellerman gives up her lush Manhattan apartment for a room in a run-down tenement in the Village. In the process of building her new life, she finds work in the vicious world of real estate, acquires a lusty new lover with some kinky habits and a live-in girlfriend, and inherits a host of quirky apartment seekers determined to drive her crazy. Belle has a keen eye for outlandish behavior which, when combined with her razor-sharp wit, gives Liv an amusingly jaundiced outlook on life in general and New Yorkers in particular. Misery should always be this much fun.

Library Journal

This work continues in the same tradition of Belle's highly praised first novel, Going Down (LJ 5/1/96), with equal parts hilarity and pain. Liv Kellerman has just left her husband after discovering his philandering. Never having been on her own before, she embarks on a new career in real estate. This novel is all New York from its high-priced apartments to its quirky characters. Liv begins dating an obsessive architect who likes to bite her. She finds a gun in a bathroom and keeps it, using it to scare aforementioned boyfriend when he turns out to be a liar and a cheat. Adjusting to a Greenwich Village dump after living in a penthouse, Liv shows fabulous apartments to clients who can't decide whether or not to buy them. Belle's portrayal of Liv's ups and downs, successes and failures are in turn funny and poignant. Interspersed are laugh-aloud lines: "When I got home I got undressed and a single pea fell out of my bra. I had gone to work with a pea in my bra and not even known it. Some princess, I thought." The film rights to Belle's first novel were optioned by Madonna; this one should have equal success. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Kathy Ingels Helmond, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Brimming with Gotham references, weird but lovable characters and typical urban scenes, Belle's second novel (after Going Down, which won her the title of Entertainment Weekly's Best New Novelist of 1996) is a witty and engaging tale of love and real estate in Manhattan. Liv Kellerman is 26 and recently divorced. In classic New York fashion, she's more upset about leaving her snazzy uptown digs than being single. Too proud to ask her wealthy father for money and lacking an advanced degree, she hits the pavement in search of a job and an apartment two things every 20-something in the city has had to struggle to secure. After she finds herself a shabby one-bedroom in Greenwich Village, "five flights above a `restaurant' called King Shawarma," she works on employment. Liv ventures into the cutthroat world of real estate, gets her license and is soon spending her days showing TriBeCa lofts to the city's most discriminating clients. She's surprisingly good at it, and her new profession turns out to be therapeutic, too her forays into Manhattan's most wanted apartments teach her a thing or two about her own inner workings. Like all New York stories, this one features an eccentric romance: here, a noncommittal boyfriend with a proclivity for biting (at one point, Liv must visit an animal hospital to have her ear reattached to her head). Belle's tongue-in-cheek style and laugh-out-loud antics keep the pages turning. Despite the lack of a riveting story line, this latest addition to the booming yuppie fiction genre is fresh and invigorating. 8-city author tour. (May 7) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Love and a nice apartment are hard to find in Manhattan, says this second novel by the author of Going Down (1996). The daughter of a rich fashion designer, Liv Kellerman never had to work a day in her life—until she left her lawyer husband when he started taking Prozac and stopped having sex with her. Problem is, he owns their apartment. Liv takes a job reading to a blind judge, but she can't afford the cockroach-infested MacDougal Street walkup she's found on a salary of eight dollars an hour. So she signs on as a real-estate trainee in a seedy office run by a mannish woman named Dale and is soon earning commissions on various weird lofts and living spaces. Wearying of Dale's out-loud fantasizing about the young girls she lusts after, Liv moves on to a much more upscale firm, raking in bigger commissions and learning that rich clients can be really strange. (One couple asks whether she'd be interested in donating an egg or two to provide a sibling for their precious tot. She demurs.) Her affair with Andrew Lugar, an eccentric architect who likes to bite during sex, is going nowhere; ditto her divorce. After reading Andrew's diary, annoyed by his loony, egomaniacal descriptions of their slightly warped romance and by the realization that he never intended to leave his girlfriend, Liv contemplates shooting the jerk. She settles for dumping him after he chomps off her earlobe. Nothing ever comes up roses for this contemporary urban heroine: her soon-to-be-ex is selling their old apartment, she has to show it to buyers who criticize the décor . . . and so on. All this convoluted action would be a lot more compelling, however, if Liz had even half the sexiness and spunk ofBennington Bloom, Going Down's call-girl heroine A meandering story, though funny enough in a blasé way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the purpose of Thanksgiving turkeys. Author tour