Synopsis "Chasing Alice (in English)"
Alice Portman is 32, marketing director for the trendy fashion magazine, Femme Moderne. Petite, glamorous, lonely, progressively alcoholic and increasingly unable to make decisions, Alice returns home one night to her upscale Upper West Side coop to find that the man she almost married three years before has moved down the hall with his wife and nine-month-old baby daughter. That weekend, in an unrelated incident, Mitchell Jaffe, a 34 year-old attorney, who in his 20s was a modern orthodox Jew and who is now divorced and secular, slaps his elder daughter across the face in a kosher pizzeria in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Who is Chasing Alice? Is it Brian Carlazzo, Alice's ex, almost-fiancé, who repeatedly stops by her apartment with his infant daughter while his wife is at work? Will he seduce Alice and make her a self-loathing paramour? Or is it Julian Branson-Glanville, the spoiled British billionaire's son, a fashion genius and heir apparent to an iconic fashion magazine. Julian entices Alice with East Side penthouse parties, cocaine, and helicopter rides out to the Hamptons. Will he win her hand? Or is it the other protagonist, the seemingly stable, attractive, financially secure Mitchell Jaffe? Mitch is in a bitter after-divorce custody battle for his younger daughter from the ultra-orthodox Brooklyn household of his tyrannical former father-in-law, Lazar. During his chase for Alice and a legal tussle with his ex-wife Riva, an extremist rabbi gets beaten up, a bomb goes off in Brooklyn, and Mitch is investigated by the DEA. Set in Manhattan, Chasing Alice is a tangled manuscript of two early adult, seemingly unrelated New Yorkers. Divorce, addiction, anorexia, dating, dysfunction, fraud, professional jealousy and a vicious intra-faith conflict fill the pages of this perceptive novel of American life in the early period of the 21st century. Michael D. Lieberman is the author of five novels and two short story collections. He splits his time between New York City and Jerusalem, Israel.
