Product Description

Liv Kellerman is 26, newly divorced, and has just lost the love of her life. Her husband? You've got to be kidding. It's her apartment she's in mourning for - her lovely penthouse apartment with its Empire State Building view. On her own for the first time in her life, Liv is forced to relocate to a crumbling Greenwich Village hovel, but things are about to get a lot worse. She's about to become an estate agent. Belle's gift for creating eccentric 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #796628 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
I missed Belle's first novel Going Down, but this one is certainly a humdinger. The narrator is Liv Kellerman, 26 and newly divorced from her husband, but she is much more concerned about losing the penthouse apartment they had with a view of the Empire State Building. With a rich father but no money of her own, she has yet to get any alimony and so moves to a crumbling Greenwich Village apartment and takes a badly paid job as a reader to a blind Judge. Becoming bored with that, she decides to become a real estate agent and meets a fellow agent called Dalt, who offers her a job in her firm (commission only, no salary) - an offer she soon regrets accepting. It is all very wacky but enormous fun; Jennifer Belle has a wicked eye for the unusual.

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 decor . . . and so on. All this convoluted action would be a lot more compelling, however, if Liz had even half the sexiness and spunk of Bennington Bloom, "Going Down's "call-girl heroine A meandering story, though funny enough in a blase way, featuring sly asides on everything from the perfidy of men to the purpose of Thanksgiving turkeys." (Kirkus Reviews)

Jay McInerney
'Jennifer Belle is a real New York original...She's got a keen eye, an acute sense of comic timing and, I would surmise, a heart tattooed just under her sleeve'

Cosmopolitan
'Will have you rolling on the floor'

Customer Reviews

Maintenanced
Jennifer Belle writes a rare kind of fiction: Lit for chicks who don't like chick-lit. While it may wear the trappings of that fiction, her second novel "High Maintenance" is darker, edgier, funnier, grittier, and far more original and fulfilling, a weird take on the traditional coming-of-age tale.

Liv Kellerman has just left her husband.... and their luxurious apartment. Now she misses the apartment more than her marriage. After working briefly for a blind judge, Liv decides to try her hand at real estate -- and quickly discovers that she's a natural. Except she's distracted by her lovesick lesbian boss, a rundown tenement, and new boyfriend Andrew who is still living with another woman. Oh yes, and he likes to chew on her ear when they have sex.

After her boss gets a bit too lovesick (and slightly nuts) for her taste, Liv moves to a better real estate agency, but her life is still in something of an uproar. Andrew is beginning to act weird, and her new clients are not much better -- even asking her to donate ova. When she finds out more about her boyfriend, Liv takes matters into her own hands to achieve the life -- and home -- that she has always longed for.

Woman leaves no-good husband, forges new life and career alone, finds new boyfriend -- chick-lit, right? Wrong. "High Maintenance" avoids the obvious story twists in favor of zany characters and increasingly strange situations. Especially since -- unlike many authors, Belle doesn't seem to think that a hunky boyfriend is the ultimate goal. Happiness (or at least contentment) is.

Considering the story's beginning, "High Maintenance" could've easily been depressing. However, Belle's insightful writing and peculiar scenarios keep things spicy and remarkably funny. She writes matter-of-factly in scenes such as a bathtub (complete with occupant) crashing through a restaurant ceiling, or Liv rushing to a vet's office after Andrew bites off part of her ear.

Liv herself seems like a remarkably real person -- she keeps trying and persevering, even when living in a ratty tenement and working out of an office in a crack-filled slum. While her affair with the cheating ear-biter is annoying, the way she breaks it off -- complete with gun and Mid-Eastern cab driver -- is hilarious.

Belle is particularly good with supporting characters, such as the blind judge, the wronged wife, the crazy apartment-hunters. Yes, they are all weird. But they also seem completely real, as if they could really exist. What is more, her love for New York -- and yes, New Yorkers -- shines through, in passages such as Liv's trip to the Empire State Building.

Funny, dark and sometimes bizarre, "High Maintenance" is a remarkably funny, unusual novel. And it will teach you to never ever date someone who bites your ears.

annoying
I didn't enjoy this book, I really struggled to finish it. I found the story annoying, I always had the feeling there was somothing missing in the narration. The characters are not very well described, I'm still not sure if two of them are men or women. An overall shallow book, not entertaining enough to read on a beach.

High Maintenance: An unusual book
Recently divorced Liv Kellerman finds herself having to move out of her million-dollar Upper East Side apartment that she once shared with her husband into a run down tenement with a non-working refrigerator and used furniture. Even though Liv's father is a famous fashion designer, so she could really move anywhere she wanted but Liv decides not to ask for help and try to make it on her own. Liv starts out on her journey to independence by becoming a reader for a blind judge but she soon decides that that is not the job for her and that she is just pushy enough to be a real estate agent. She soon finds that this is her calling and begins working for an androgynous woman by the name of Dale who owns a real estate gallery, which sells real estate and knick-knacks as well. On the road to independence Liv encounters some of the strangest characters one could imagine none stranger that her love interest Andrew who in my opinion is the nut job of the century which says a whole lot about Liv who decided to date him in the first place.
This book was not at all what I expected. I bought `HIGH MANTINENCE' thinking that it was going to be a light-hearted romantic comedy but it turned out to be a bit dark, very sarcastic and extremely strange. It took me a while to warm up to the book because I couldn't relate to the characters nor did I like them but the further I read the funnier it got until I found myself laughing out loud. I grew to like Liv and her sarcastic nature but continued to despise her boyfriend Andrew (who was living with another woman the entire time) till the bitter end. I could not understand what Liv could have possibly seen in Andrew who upon their first meeting asked her "what would you do if I threw you off of this balcony?" and then proceeded to lift her up and dangle her over the edge. I kept waiting for Liv to see the light and get rid of this creep but she continued to go back to him as their relationship got stranger and stranger. As I said this novel was completely the opposite of what I expected but that's what made me stay up at nigh trying to finish this book.