Overview
In Death by Leisure, the hilariously inept antihero of War Reporting for Cowards returns from the Iraqi marshlands to the Hollywood Hills, where he proceeds to embed himself in America's bubble economy-just as it's about to explode. Before long he's drinking foie gras piña coladas, smearing caviar in strange places, and borrowing seven-digit sums from grinning mortgage salesmen, all while trying to meet women by selling furniture on Craigslist. This is a shamelessly honest, savagely funny memoir (Ayres's encounter with Michael Jackson on a date-from-hell is not to be missed) that chronicles the runaway aspirations of a generation-and the carnage that followed.
Synopsis
The hilariously intrepid young author of War Reporting for Cowards returns from Iraq only to dive head-first into another absurd, terrifying world: the American leisure class. Like Hunter Thompson crossed with one of David Brooks’s bobos in paradise, Ayres embeds himself in LA’s “liesuretocracy”: an over-the-top world of caviar facials, billionaire charity balls, souped-up SUVs, and monster home loans . . . not to mention $1,000-a-night brothels and million-dollar poker tournaments. Ayres’s highly leveraged lifestyle lands him a surreal night with a supermodel, a date at Michael Jackson’s birthday party in Neverland Ranch (Ayres bribes the organizers five grand to get in), and a wife courtesy of Craigslist. But disaster is never far away. In the book’s brutal final section, Ayres is forced to confront the excesses of his generation at a scene of apocalyptic destruction: the Katrina-ravaged South. Told with a blend of offbeat irreverence, genuine pathos, and incisive social commentary, Death by Leisure is a savage and darkly humorous odyssey that taps directly into the contemporary psyche.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
Fast and funny, Death by Leisure has the high spirits of a chick book, because its author is interested in chick-lit things: dates, celebrities, vanity and shopping. But it is also a tale of real woe…Global climate change and the collapse of the American home market should not be conflated as easily as they are here, in a gonzo-style book with topics skittering from $1-per-blackhead California facials to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. But Mr. Ayres somehow manages to cram all these elements into his wild-eyed American adventure. His unifying thread is self-deprecation.
Editorials
Janet Maslin
Fast and funny, Death by Leisure has the high spirits of a chick book, because its author is interested in chick-lit things: dates, celebrities, vanity and shopping. But it is also a tale of real woe…Global climate change and the collapse of the American home market should not be conflated as easily as they are here, in a gonzo-style book with topics skittering from $1-per-blackhead California facials to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. But Mr. Ayres somehow manages to cram all these elements into his wild-eyed American adventure. His unifying thread is self-deprecation.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Upon return from embedded duty in Iraq with a marines unit, Ayres, a British journalist, chronicles his brief visit to Los Angeles, the land of glam and glitz. This gonzo-influenced volume opens with Ayres (War Reporting for Cowards) getting the sultry once-over from a beauty in a white bikini at poolside, and everything goes wacky and downhill from there with a bogus assignment to cover singer Michael Jackson, his Neverland estate and his sleepovers. Ayres marvels at the perpetually sunny weather of "the sci-fi metropolis," and the Tinseltown crowd of "Beverly Hill princesses, plum-cheeked hedonists, journalists with notebooks and bad breath, fleets of android publicists, the rich, the very rich." Ayres makes note of this life of excess, eco disasters and obsession with physical perfection. Producing a topsy-turvy carnival ride of a book, Ayres knows how to find the laughs and fantasy in this accomplished satire of Los Angeles. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Ayres (War Reporting for Cowards) fancies himself the consummate outsider as a British journalist now living in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, what is supposed to be his witty and self-deprecating look at his life in LA is instead a chore to get through, offering outdated cultural insights (people post sex ads on Craigslist), obvious political observations (the Chinese government owns American bonds), and tired Los Angeles stereotypes (everyone eats alfalfa sprouts). Ayres does not live in the leisure economy, as implied. Instead, he maxes out his credit cards, leases a car he cannot afford, and buys an overpriced home with an overwhelming sense of guilt rather than enjoyment. Instead of a window on life in the leisure economy, Ayres shows us what it's like to be debt-ridden in Los Angeles during the housing bubble and subsequent crash. Ayres wants us to see him as funny and tragic, but he just comes across as tragic. Not recommended.
—Manya Shorr