<DIV>Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful redhead, contrary, highly strung, and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy’s peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it’s time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn’t. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book. By turns angry, elegiac, and rude, <I>Zoo Time</I> is a novel about love—love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.</DIV>