Look at It This Way

This stylish and delightful novel leads the reader on a bracing romp through the topsy-turvy world of today’s London via a diverse cast of characters. The narrator is Tim Curtiz, an expatriate American journalist (“a poor man’s Gore Vidal”) who writes a bi-weekly letter from London for a New York magazine. Prowling about in his shiny new Mercedes, on the look-out for local color and illuminating ironies, Tim encounters a strange – and strangely connected – cavalcade of eccentrics: an over-the-hill East End actor with a bit part in a commercial and an eye on the big chance; a young advertising woman bedeviled by boyfriend troubles and a leaky condo; a decrepit pensioner who once fended off (and killed!) an attacking lion with a pen knife; a cashiered currency trader who falls headfirst into a money-laundering scam; and an aging lion slated to be “euthanized.” As we follow the intersecting arcs of these disparate lives, we discover a city that has been brokered, blighted, and betrayed – but which also somehow remains the London town of yore: a city where people still find true love, where cockeyed Cockney dreams come true, and where – at least sometimes – malefactors are fed to the lions. On the British publication of Look at It This Way, the London Sunday Times wrote of this diverting and perceptive novel that it “does for London what Bonfire of the Vanities did for New York.” Readers will find the comparison an apt one.