Tenement of Clay: a Novel

Slums of the American city of New Babylon provide an all-too-real setting for Paul West?s premier fiction, Tenement of Clay, the prescient novel that launched his marvelous and tenebrous career more than a quarter century ago. Amazingly, this major work has not been published in the United States until now. At surface level, this narrative fugue discovers a self-righteous man attempting to provide temporal salvation to a hodgepodge of homeless, most notably Pee Wee Lazarus (midget wrestler and part-time narrator) and John Lacland (an insensate semi-adult foundling). But lying just beneath Papa Nick?s altruistic intent are complex motives, depths of human conflict which call up the great themes of Melville, and reveal the treacherous tenor of our times.