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Chez Chance

Jay Gummerman

1995211 pagesabout 3–5 hours
1995
first published
  • 1995Pantheon Books · 211 pages · ENGISBN 9780679439912
  • 1997University of California Press · 211 pages · ENGISBN 9780520210806
  • 1998Random House Value Publishing · ENGISBN 9780517301777

A freak accident has left Frank Eastman a paraplegic - a "wild card" who needs to "pair up with someone or something or he won't pass back into existence." Los Angeles is where he imagines this existence to be, but when he arrives there, he finds it's not quite the life he expected. Home - at least temporarily - is a rundown motel near Disneyland, and his neighbors a wild assortment of eccentrics, who, though more able-bodied than Frank, have learned the effectiveness of willful inability. What Frank learns from them, in magnificently odd and mesmerizing conversations, will leave him as transformed emotionally as he has been changed physically.

How do you feel?