Abstract

I Found Your Address in a Fortune Cookie is a short novel documenting a man's life from childhood to death-bed. It is structured as a series of fragments that, while not strictly chronological, play off one another to create an emotional landscape. The narrative voice shifts between the first and third person. Although going about his life with the semblance of routine, Joshua, the protagonist, is thirsting for something unnamable. His desire runs from mundane, sensual pleasures like lying in bed or drinking coffee to desires for which there are no easy names, like the desire to escape the body. The novel is composed of a series of romantic relationships that span Joshua's early adolescence to his middle age. Approaching death, he withdraws into a dream world in which the messiah has arrived; but even salvation offers little in the way of providing a bottom line to existence. The messianic age proves only to be a continuance of the mundane.