Based Upon Availability
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Jacket Copy:
A Harper Paperback Original: June 8th, 2010
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From the very first page of Based Upon Availability readers will be drawn into the strange, often humorous world where eight women grapple with family, sex, power, love and death. Throughout this powerful novel, these characters explore the basic need for human connection while seeking to understand themselves better. Each of Strauss’ characters are lonely, strong and driven women who, when pushed to the edge, must fight for their lives as they struggle to become the women they wish to be.
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Readers will meet Trish, a gallery owner struggling to deal with the wedding and the dramatic weight loss of her best friend, both of which create too much change and thus lead her down a self-destruction path; Robin, a realtor, who, after experiencing a lifetime of abuse by her older sister, is forced to take revenge; Anne, a lonely, single woman who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, searches for normalcy and love; Louise, a drug-addicted rock star, is sent away to dry out by her just as famous publicist; Franny, a Southerner turned wanna-be Manhattanite so envious of her neighbors’ lives and their nesting habits becomes unhealthily attached to them; Sheila, a single teacher takes extreme measures to punish her boyfriend when he informs her he’s returning to his wife; Ellen, a married, childless woman so desperate to have children insists she’s pregnant. And Morgan, a manager at the swanky Four Seasons in Manhattan, who is haunted by the memory of her dead sister and is the thread that weaves these women together. At some point, the hotel houses each of these women—either for an hour or for several days—offering sanctuary to some, solace to others, even despair.
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"I've always had a love affair with hotels, and have longed to know what happens behind closed doors. I especially love the anonymity hotels offer,” says Strauss. “The retreat from real life. The idea that you can be anyone from anywhere. And that once you're gone, the rooms are stripped down, wiped clean. All traces of you are erased, as if you'd never been there."
With a keen eye for human connection and the universal longings we all experience, Alix Strauss asks and answers the age-old question; ‘what happens behind closed doors’ while examining the walls we put up as we attempt intimacy, and inspecting the ruins when they’re knocked down.
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Early Praise:
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“There's a story behind every room at Manhattan's famed Four Seasons Hotel, and in her engaging second novel Alix Strauss weaves them together in a dark and complicated tapestry. From the seemingly put-together manager to the aging rock star, every character has a secret and nothing is what it seems. You'll never look at anyone in a hotel quite the same way again.” – Shari Goldhagen, author of Family and Other Accidents
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“Based Upon Availability is like a beautifully-wrapped gift box, full of unexpected pleasures. Alix Strauss proves herself to be an astute and deeply feeling observer of human nature.” – Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion, Slow Motion, and Black & White
“Alix Strauss is one of the most enjoyable writers in this or any country. Based Upon Availability is fun, smart and beautiful.” – Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng, and More Than It Hurts You
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"It's Eloise from the Plaza, now 32 and running the hotel, with a hint of the S&M of Mary Gaitskill and the elegant precision of Lorrie Moore—and the touch of Strauss's own signature macabre that I adore." – Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance, and The Seven Year Bitch
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“Alix Strauss takes my idea of the swanky Four Seasons Hotel and turns it upside down. Anything goes: ladies lunching, rooms ransacked, illicit pills taken, S&M fantasies explored—plus fabulous spa treatments for good measure. Based Upon Availability is full of surprises. I could not turn the pages fast enough.” – Marcy Dermansky, author of Bad Marie, and Twins
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Reviews:
Liz Smith: Our Gossip Girl checks in on a hot summer read
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"I VANT to be alone." So said Greta Garbo to John Barrymore in the fabulous 1932 MGM movie, "Grand Hotel." Garbo was playing an exhausted prima ballerina. (Come to think of it, Garbo always seemed exhausted onscreen.) Joan Crawford and a dozen other MGM luminaries also appeared.
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The movie was based on the big bestselling novel by Vicki Baum. MGM remade it as "Weekend at the Waldorf" in 1945 and the genre of a glam ensemble cast in glam surroundings was truly launched. (The 1967 movie "Hotel" and the 1980s TV series of the same named followed the same pattern.)
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Now, author Alix Strauss has written Based upon Availability, a novel about eight women who pass through NYC’s plush Four Seasons Hotel. It is "Grand Hotel" for the 21st century. This is the classic read-it-in-one-big-gulp book. Or spend several days at the beach with it; compelling from first page to last – edgy, moving, human.
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Tomorrow Ms. Strauss and friends will celebrate the book’s release with a party at – where else? – the Four Seasons restaurant. There will be nibbling and noshing and sipping.
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Oh, and I predict before the last hors d’oeuvres is consumed, Based Upon Availability will be on the fast track to big-screen option. This movie has eight, count ‘em eight, fascinating female characters. By this time next year eight great actresses might be toiling on location right here in Manhattan, bringing Alix’s book to life.
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New York Post: Required Reading
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From Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table to Eloise and the Plaza, colorful writing and New York hotels have made for a natural pairing. In her new novel Based Upon Availability, Alix Strauss takes on famed New York lodging the Four Seasons, filling the stories hostelry with colorful women characters who share a common bond—Morgan, the hotel's manager. Morgan may know just a little more than most about what goes on behind closed doors.
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ELLE: Top 10 Summer Books for 2010
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For every hotel guest, there’s a story behind their visit. “I’ve always had a love affair with hotels,” says author Alix Strauss. In her second book (her first was ELLE favorite The Joy of Funerals), she explores this fascination by sliding a microscope over eight women’s ostensibly ordinary lives at Manhattan’s Four Seasons Hotel. This posh place serves as a sanctuary of zen or an abode of anguish for an obsessing gallery owner, an abused realtor, a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a drug-addict rock star, a famous publicist, a single teacher, a married woman desperately trying to conceive, and a hotel manager struggling with the death of her sister. These women’s interiors are exposed as they deal with love, family, sex, and power. This sharp and brilliant novel shows that truth cannot be seen from the outside. You’ll absorb every anecdote’s last detail as real human connection resurfaces and these women take steps to become the people they’ve always dreamed they’d be.
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More: Behind Closed (Hotel Room) Doors
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In Alix Strauss' novel Based Upon Availability, the women who stay at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City are troubled, lonely, secretive—and wholly relatable. They’re plagued by obsessions, and yearn for love and validation from their distant families. Some of them tangle with men, but the most powerful relationships are between women—sisters, best friends, and business partners.
Overseeing the Four Seasons is Morgan, whose tough self-reliance fails to hide the hole in her heart over her deceased sister. Although each of the women—too many to name here—are quirky and engaging, Morgan embodies their shared desperation and desire to survive. She has her own strange habits, most notably picking a hotel key at random each day and sneaking into a guest's room to poke into their personal lives. There is not a more fitting narrator.
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Strauss has a knack for inserting the kinds of surprises that shock but also strengthen the impact of the novel. The stories bleed into one another as details and characters resurface in different chapters. Most enthralling is the anecdote (first introduced through Morgan) of a woman tied to a hotel bed, her hair chopped off and her body covered in blood and liquor. This seeming victim returns later, unexpectedly, as a guest-star in her sister's chapter.
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The lure of the hotel is its transient quality. However much of a home it becomes to the shoppers, lovers, and refugees who stay there, once they leave, the place can be wiped clean, ready for a new inhabitant. The allure of this novel is that it offers a glimpse into the lives of complex, funny, real women.
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Booklist: May 1, 2010
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The women in Strauss’ mesmerizing novel all suffer from an inability to connect with family, with men, with potential friends. Morgan, a 32-year-old manager at the upscale Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, is still devastated more than two decades after the death of her older sister Dale. Constantly wondering how her life would be different if her sister was still alive, and feeling closer to Dale than anyone living, Morgan resents that her parents have bottled up their grief in a way she can’t. At work, Morgan sneaks into random hotel rooms to swipe prescription meds and study the belongings of the hotel’s various patrons. Strauss gives readers a glimpse into the lives of the women whose paths Morgan crosses, from the aging rock star whose publicist checks her into the hotel in a last-ditch effort to get her to sober up, to the obsessive-compulsive hotel employee whose boyfriend commits the ultimate act of betrayal, to a decorator so desperate to get pregnant that she comes to believe she actually is. Lonely and longing to be otherwise, the characters in this moving novel are achingly sympathetic, their plights imminently relatable.
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Kirkus Review
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From Strauss (stories: The Joy of Funerals, 2003, etc.), a novel concerning a Manhattan Four Seasons manager who witnesses the alarmingly bleak lives of women (herself included) confronting the loss of youth.
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Morgan, 32, is haunted by her sister Dale’s death from leukemia when both were children. She alone in her family appears to still mourn Dale, and she can’t get close to her mother, who cares only for conspicuous consumption and her clique of ladies who lunch. Morgan has seen her Uncle Marty, a prominent shrink, escorting female patients to rooms at the Midtown Four Seasons, where she’s division manager. Morgan’s inner emptiness—she’s just broken up with her too-dull, too-safe boyfriend Bernard—prompts her to take brief vacations on the wild side while at work. There’s the busboy she trysts with in the kitchen pantry. There are the hotel rooms she “inspects” at random, pilfering objects including an SM leather brace, which she finds oddly comforting to wear. Morgan encounters other women—guests, vendors, employees or clients of the Four Seasons—each of whom occupies her own section of the novel. Anne, a novice concierge, is obsessed with luck, charms and omens. Svelte, elegant Trish, adopted child of famous parents, struggles to distinguish herself, opening a gallery and hosting a weight-loss party for her BFF Olive, who, distressingly, is shedding Trish along with the extra pounds. Ellen, traumatized by two miscarriages, is baffled by the refusal of her husband and gynecologist to believe she’s several months pregnant. Mississippi native Franny, despite a lucrative career and a nice apartment, envies her blissfully coupled and child-blessed neighbors. Aging rocker Louise checks into the Four Seasons to detox. Trouble is, without coke, booze and pills, the space inside Lou’s head is as claustrophobic as her locked hotel room. Robin, a downtrodden younger sister, takes bizarre revenge on her manipulative sibling Vicki.
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These New York stories, utterly wrenching with pessimistic undercurrents, will remind some readers of Parker—as in Dorothy, not Sarah Jessica.
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Publishers Weekly: April 5, 2010
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Strauss's stellar first novel (after story collection The Joy of Funerals) chronicles the loneliness of New Yorkers loosely connected by the swanky Four Seasons hotel. Hotel manager Morgan, Strauss's strongest protagonist, longs for the company of her older sister, Dale, who died of leukemia as a child. She's in a go-nowhere relationship and hoping to find a friend in Trish Hemingway, an artist and gallery owner who reminds her of Dale. Trish, meanwhile, is coming to terms with growing apart from her best friend, and she's not fully over her fiancé, who left her shortly before they were to be married. Subplots play out and scenes are revisited courtesy of a number of perspectives—hotel employees, friends and family, hotel guests—creating a near mosaic with twinges of darkness, thanks largely to the strange and unexpected things that go on behind hotel doors: the s&m gear Morgan steals after snooping in a guest's room, an abused woman found tied to a bed. Strauss's ending, which strives to be hopeful, comes off as abrupt; otherwise, this is quite sublime.
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