High Maintenance

Jennifer Belle

Jul 2002 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

National Bestseller
The story of an obsessive love affair between a woman and an apartment.

The publication of her sexy, offbeat, riotous first novel, Going Down, won Jennifer Belle comparisons from everyone from Dorothy Parker and Lorrie Moore to J. D. Salinger and Liz Phair. In High Maintenance, Belle is back with another brilliantly twisted New York story that is as funny, sad, painful, ridiculous, wild, daring, and lovable as its predecessor.

Set in the manic world of New York real estate, High Maintenance is the story of Liv Kellerman, a young woman who's just left her husband and, more important, their fabulous penthouse apartment with its Empire State Building view. On her own for the first time in her life, she relocates to a crumbling Greenwich Village hovel and contemplates her next move. Before long she finds her true calling: selling real estate. With her native eye for prime properties and an ability to lie with a straight face, Liv finds success and soon is swimming with the sharks-the hardcore, cutthroat brokers who'll do anything to close a deal. Along the way she picks up a maniacally ardent architect who likes to bite her, a few hilarious bosses, strange and exasperating clients, and a gun, and brings them with her on her search for the one thing she's really after: a home.

Belle's gift for creating strange and winning characters and her acute observations of both the absurd and the poignant in everyday life are the hallmarks of her fiction. High Maintenance is generous and unsparing, tough and exciting and terrifically smart—a hot new property on the market.

Ratings and reviews

Very disappointing.The plot is disjointed and drags on forever. I was not a far of character development style. Transphobic language and has homophobic slur.

It's a book I can read again and again. I really love to read this book when I'm on long flights, it keeps me entertained.

I liked book

About the author

Jennifer Belle is the bestselling author of Going Down (for which she was named best debut novelist of the year by Entertainment Weekly), High Maintenance, and Little Stalker. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Independent (London), Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Ms., Black Book, Mudfish, and many anthologies. She lives in New York City and Olivebridge, New York, with her husband and their two sons.