Vincent and Alice and Alice

by Shane Jones

Overview

From the visionary author of Light Boxes, a mind-bending office comedy, and a touching modern love story set against the backdrop of an ever-increasingly disorienting America. Being home all the time is depressing, so I tell my boss “I’m ready for anything” in the strongest conference call voice in the world while driving my hand into a family-sized bag of tortilla chips. Without a future, no Alice, I’m ready for an adventure. Meet Vincent. After his divorce from Alice he’s lost his way, and is mindlessly working for the State, counting down the days till retirement. When his boss tells him to participate in a program that promises not only to increase productivity, but show him his “ideal life” he thinks: what’s the harm? Others have seen new marked improvements in productivity and personal happiness. Willing to try anything to move away from the heartbreak of Alice, Vincent reluctantly complies. But what the program shows him, is that his ideal life is simply Alice. She’s back. Is she real? A clone? A hologram? Despite the lingering questions, Vincent eases back into love and begins to live his life again with Alice, that is, until the real Alice returns. A novel about work, love, and how to live in the present moment, Vincent and Alice and Alice flings us through a shockingly funny and tender-hearted world just a few degrees different from our own, one that introduces us to a wild cast of characters, including the enigmatic CEO of PER, Dorian Blood, a mysterious under-cover cop, and the acid-tongued Elderly, a man living in his car who may be the only one who understands how to live in reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733535984
Publisher:	Tyrant Books
Publication date:	07/09/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Shane Jones is a writer living in upstate New York. His previous novels include: Light Boxes, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, and Crystal Eaters.

Interviews

“In its intimate rendering of marriage, work, and a kind of archetypal American despair,Vincent and Alice and Alicefeels fresh, raw, and funny, even in its most tender,
saddest moments. It reads like a beautifully pinched nerve.”
– Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2019

The narrator of Jones’s uneven novel (after Crystal Eaters), an everyman named Vincent, is pushing 40 and nine years into a mind-numbing state job that will yield an exceptional retirement package as long as he stays for 30 years. He’s recently divorced from his wife, Alice, an idealistic nonprofit worker who could no longer stand the banalities of their life together, no matter that Vincent is still in love with her. Unable to be fully present at work in the aftermath of the divorce, Vincent enters the mysterious Patrol for Everyday Repetition (PER) program, led by the enigmatic Dorian Blood. PER promises a way for Vincent “to live a fulfilling existence while being a productive worker.” In other words, as Vincent embraces the monotony of capitalism, he will be rewarded by a tangible manifestation of his ideal life, which will eventually “overlap then blanket reality.” For Vincent, all that means is having Alice back. Though PER initially seems to work, reality keeps intruding on Vincent’s life: he loses his dog, his only friend goes missing, and finally the real Alice reappears. Jones is an imaginative writer, capable of astute observations about capitalism and desire, but the execution never quite lives up to the ambition of the concept. This is an entertaining effort, but it may leave some readers unsatisfied. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Vincent and Alice and Alice contains my favorite combination: laugh-out-loud funny and knife-in-your-heart sad. Inventive, surprising, and tender – I loved watching this story unfurl. No one writes like Shane Jones.” – Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else

From the Publisher

2019-04-14
An artist-cum-bureaucrat gets his wife back (or a version of her) in Jones' (Crystal Eaters, 2014, etc.) fourth novel.

It is a summer of thunderstorms and xenophobic unrest in A-Ville, but Vincent, a former painter who works for the state, hardly notices. He's reeling with depression because his wife, Alice—fed up with Vincent's emotional enslavement to the retirement package (still hypothetical and more than 20 years away) that keeps him from quitting his job and leaving A-Ville—has divorced him. Then Vincent is asked to participate in PER, a program run by Ronald Reagan worshipper Dorian Blood, who promises that PER will allow Vincent to "live a fulfilling existence while being a productive worker"; in other words, it will distort his experience of reality so that he can work with "stunning proficiency" while "physically interacting with the life [he's] always wanted." Vincent has reservations, but Jones wouldn't have a book if Vincent didn't acquiesce, so he does, only to discover that his ideal life consists of just one change: It includes Alice. An uneasy mishmash of social satire, moral fable, dystopian sci-fi, and love story, Jones' novel slides between the influential shadows of writers like Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, Philip K. Dick, and Don DeLillo while never quite cohering into a convincing shape of its own. This is, in part, because the world—a twist and shake different from our own—feels incompletely built. PER Alice, for example, is never quite convincing as an entity, mostly because we don't know the metaphysical rules of her existence: Sometimes she's visible and audible to others—when she answers the telephone, her words are heard—and yet she's also a nontangible figment of Vincent's memory. Similarly underdeveloped are A-ville's violence and racism, the existence of which would powerfully indict Vincent's solipsism—people are attacking Muslims while he perpetuates his fantasies and earns his pension—if the scenes that describe it, which are jocular and cartoonish, didn't feel written solely to have exactly that moral effect. However, Jones is an acute cultural observer and a very funny aphorist—"Anger is lazy"; "Men are brave but only inside cars"; "Everything makes sense if you let it";—and his book, despite its faults, contains many delights.

An intelligent, entertaining, and yet unconvincing mashup of Office Space, A Scanner Darkly, and A Clockwork Orange.

Kirkus Reviews