Show Up, Look Good

by Mark Wisniewski

Overview

2011 ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for General Fiction-Finalist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781928589600
Publisher:	Gival Press
Publication date:	09/01/2014
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

What People are Saying About This

Christine Sneed

Show Up, Look Good is a rare, gleaming gem: as soon as I turned the final page, I felt bereft because I didn't want it to end. Wisniewski has a poet's heart, a jester's wit, and a comedian's dead-on timing. This is a novel to savor. (Christine Sneed, author of Portraits of a Few People I've Made Cry, winner of The Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

Jonathan Lethem

Wisniewski: a riotously original voice. (Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City)

T. R. Hummer

Mark Wisniewski's prose is incisive and crisp, bracing and in the best sense destructive, like a straight shot of excellent gin. Part Carson McCullers, part Truman Capote, part Elmore Leonard, Show Up, Look Good is ultimately a highly original, entertaining, and disturbing read, accurate but precisely off-center. Just when you think you know how it moves, it proves you wrong, and you're delighted: Wisniewski is that crafty a craftsman, that intelligent a writer. (T. R. Hummer, author of Walt Whitman in Hell)

Ben Fountain

Show Up, Look Good is a rollicking, laugh-out-loud romp of a novel, a picaresque spin through fin-de-siecle New York as seen through the eyes of its intrepid, Midwestern-born heroine. Love, loneliness, roommates from hell, hipsters, the mob, and murder all play starring roles in this delightful book, and Wisniewski does justice to them all. (Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara)

Kelly Cherry

This novel about a thirty-something woman who travels from Kankakee, Illinois, to New York to 'make it' deepens in unexpected and moving ways. Wisniewski ventriloquizes with perfect pitch his female narrator, who has a real talent for getting into trouble. Show Up, Look Good is funny, dark, poignant, and unsettling. (Kelly Cherry, author of We Can Still Be Friends)

DeWitt Henry

With equal parts rue and satire, Mark Wisniewski's thirty-four-year-old Midwestern heroine, Michelle, flees love gone wrong at home to start over with nerve and independence in Manhattan. Her picaresque misadventures and her encounters with characters odd, pretentious, and menacing prove as haunting as Holden Caulfield's. (DeWitt Henry, author of Sweet Dreams, founding editor of Ploughshares)

Molly Giles

Forget My Sister Eileen. With wit and insight, Wisniewski shows what really happens when a resourceful, optimistic, upbeat young woman from the Midwest comes to Manhattan to make it. (Molly Giles, author of Rough Translations, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

Diana Spechler

Show Up, Look Good made me laugh out loud at both Wisniewski's sharp wit and the narrator's propensity for making the mess of her life messier. It's a page-turner, a thrill, and a dark love song to New York City. What a terrific novel. (Diana Spechler, author of Who By Fire and Skinny)

Katherine Center

There's good writing, and then there's kick-ass writing, and Mark Wisniewski's storytelling is absolutely kick-ass. I wanted to jump up and down. (Katherine Center, author of Everyone Is Beautiful and Bright Side of Disaster)

Richard Burgin

In Show Up, Look Good Mark Wisniewski demonstrates again why he is one of the most versatile, entertaining, and accomplished writers of his generation. (Richard Burgin, author of Rivers Last Longer and The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Editor, Boulevard)

Editorial Reviews

An endearing and sometimes cleverly written heroine fumbles through this haphazardly plotted new novel from Wisniewski (Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman). When she is dumped by her fiancé, Michelle leaves her life in Kankakee, Ill., and runs off to New York City. Existing is enough for Michelle, who can barely be bothered to think about a job. After surviving a series of ill-advised roommates (an elderly Norwegian woman, a pretentious M.F.A. student, and a swinging couple) and hatching schemes like scalping complimentary David Letterman tickets, Michelle moves to a cheap, decrepit apartment in Queens. While living on her own for the first time in her 30s, she toys with becoming an artist and begins to come to terms with her mother's death. Although amusing, Michelle's lack of ambition does not receive enough attention. The murder story line mentioned on page one does not reappear until the novel's final 25 pages, where it feels like a feeble attempt to tack on narrative weight and resolution. Although Michelle's sassy voice presents the beginnings of an interesting character sketch, this novel lacks the depth and drama to be judged a success. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Show Up, Look Good has an ending to die for.

Rosebud Magazine

Wisniewski's voice is energetic, his narrative compelling.

Psychology Today

What we have to applaud Wisniewski for is the way that both setting and protagonist, the two richly delineated in all their singularity, nonetheless point to the universal. New York could be any city, any place, and Michelle could be any person—the archetypal seeker trying desperately to find her place in the world. If the city seems utterly immense, alien, daunting, and in fact is, as Dreiser's work clearly illustrates, smallness doesn't necessarily mean connection and comfort, or a sense of well-being. Wisniewski's tragicomedy scintillates with a troupe of characters that might call to mind a medieval parade of the vices. But then, that's the world, large or small, isn't it? If we look closely enough?

The Iowa Review

A picaresque treat, here's the tale of a bittersweet cookie from Kankakee all hot for New York City. Will the Big Apple feed her fantasies or have her for lunch? Having caught her tree-surgeon boyfriend in flagrante delicto not with a real-life squeeze but a plastic vagina (!), Michelle reckons she's ripe for a re-think—of life, love-life, the whole shebang. "You think too much," he tells her. And so, remorselessly, she proceeds to—throughout all the pages of this chuckler. For while action abounds, it's the running commentary that runs this show: Seinfeld-style making-much-about-everything, occasionally with a social-satire edge—the heroine, for example, typecasting the All-American Job as "typing, selling insurance, or otherwise staring at a monitor." Speaking of which, when she flees heartland humdrum, she hits Gotham without one—a job, that is. So, plucky as are all headstrong distaff protags from the Victorians on, she improvises—and develops a scam selling courtesy tickets to the Letterman show. The requisite find-an-apartment bit is handled with a sweetly weirdo touch, as Michelle lands a berth with an oldster who charges cheap, so long as Michelle bathes her and suffers her singing of "zany Norwegian songs." Mishaps mount up—she crashes her car trying to sell it to a perplexed Chinese family, gets busted by Letterman staffers, loses her digs to a freak conflagration. Not much sex in the city for Michelle, either, as any budding romance wilts. Yet she gets savvier, more self-acceptingly self-aware—for instance, despite near-smothering under black-clad bohos, she realizes she's cool with the fact that "I prefer clothes that cover my navel, and songs by Phil Collins can still make me cry." As the novel speeds toward conclusion, however, something odd happens. Wisniewski (Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, 1997, etc.) eventually careens out of laugh-land and places the reader in an atmosphere bleak, violent and very dark. It doesn't quite work. Still, this is one smart hoot.

Kirkus Reviews