"A Visit From The Footbinder," Emily Prager

The hideous cover of this short story collection really stood out when I first saw it in the paperback rack of a small-town pharmacy in 1984. No fourth-rate Carver wannabe stories in here, it fairly screamed. Emily Prager’s cv -- fashion model and National Lampoon staffer -- closed the sale.

The short stories and novella collected herein are mostly along the lines of what I’d been hoping for when I bought the book: the kind of anti-authoritarian comedy and tone the best Lampoon short stories offered, but more expansive and lyrical, on a more personal level. And genuinely transgressive where the lesser Lampoon stuff was merely gross.

Nothing prepared me for the title story, though, and I’ve never gotten over it.

“A Visit From The Footbinder” has the power and menace and simplicity of style of a great folk tale. As far as I know, it hasn’t been anthologized and taught in college. It should be. If you haven’t read it, track it down.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Lucky Bastard

Charles McCarry’s Lucky Bastard never made it into paperback, and it’s yet to be reprinted by Overlook Press, the house that’s brought most of his earlier books back into print. The Random House first edition (from 1998) is an ugly-looking book: the wrap is an inch undersized, revealing the topmost of a series of Kennedy half-dollars tumbling down the front and back of the boards. (It’s like a hardcover version of those hideous peek-a-boo mass market covers.)

Loathsome appearance aside, the novel had the misfortune of being pegged in reviews as a satire of the Clinton journey to the White House, and one that appeared a full two years after Joe Klein’s Primary Colors -- a reductive assessment that no doubt played a part in the book now qualifying as forgotten.

Klein’s roman à clef is knowing and funny; McCarry’s novel is a brazen fantasia, but one grounded, nevertheless, in what feel like political realities that any sane American would wish to be able to dismiss as pure fantasy. Difficult as it may be, even now, not to view the story of James Fitzgerald Adams and his wife, Morgan -- chosen during their college years by a rogue KGB mastermind to be future residents of the White House -- through the prism of the Clintons, it’s worth the effort. The story is bigger than that. As narrated by their soulful Russian handler, it’s a beautiful piece of writing, and reading it may leave you giddy.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Budding Prospects

T. Coraghessan Boyle is probably my favorite living short story writer. The archetypal Boyle narrator/protagonist –- a too-intellectual sad sack, half-clinging to hippie ideals he no longer believes in or lives by, easily led around by the pecker, battered by whatever societal or natural disaster catches the author’s fancy this time -– is a surprisingly hardy fellow, a regular Buster Keaton figure. You welcome him turning up in story after story, surviving all sorts of out-there scenarios.

In the novels, though, that same character can come to seem like a bit of a straw man.

Not so in Budding Prospects, his second novel.

Lighter than anything else I’ve read by him, this is a pretty straightforward comic novel -- a marriage of the traditions of the “fuck-up” novel and the heist novel -- about a simple plan to grow and sell some marijuana in northern California.

The novel begins:

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn't give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

If you need more convincing, and you’ve never read T.C. Boyle before, check out one of those story collections first.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Trace

Reading this week of Gregory McDonald’s death, I remembered how startling the first sighting of Fletch on the paperback rack at the supermarket or drugstore, in the late ‘70s, was. What the hell is this? I thought. Dialogue on the cover? I was 10 or 11 at the time, but I knew that covers were for sexy illustrations or for photo still-lifes of handguns & drug paraphernalia.

But those Fletch covers had the immediacy of a great newspaper headline. There was no need to pick the book up and thumb through it. You knew you were going to buy the book before you ever touched it. Probably the only pure true case of a book you could judge by its cover.



Of course, when the Fletch books became best-sellers, the text of other books began leaking out onto covers, but years went by before the design was applied to anything I considered reading. And then the Trace books started showing up.

The dialogue on the covers of the Trace books was nowhere near as good as Gregory McDonald’s, but I was all caught up with Fletch and wanted something similar, and these books were doing back flips to look like McDonald’s stuff. On some level, too, I think I wanted to see how you might go about ripping off work you admired and tweaking it enough to make it your own, and something told me the Trace books accomplished this.

The author Warren Murphy is best known as the author or co-author of the three thousand books in the Destroyer series, but I haven’t read any of them. I don't know if the emulation of Fletch stretches far beyond the cover; at any rate, the Trace books are quite different.

Here is what I remember: Devlin Tracy is an investigator for an insurance company. He hates the company he works for, and is tired of doing investigative work for a living; he constantly daydreams of making a big score by inventing something, but his only real skills seem to be 1) the ability to tell when someone is lying, and 2) the ability to drink astonishing quantities of alcohol.

The cases he works on bring him into contact with wealthy families right out of Lew Archer Land, and he alienates nearly everyone he meets (with the exception of his faithful girlfriend -- who, if I remember correctly, solves the mystery in a couple of the later books, while Trace nurses a hangover somewhere.)

Darker (or more depressive) than the Fletch books, lighter than Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley, the Trace books would probably appeal to a fan of either. Find one and save it for next summer: Trace’s drink is gin, I believe.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday's Forgotten Book: A Stranger In This World

A Stranger In This World by Kevin Canty, published in 1994, doesn’t seem to enjoy the afterlife it deserves. It’s both a first book and a short story collection, and, as in a lot of literary short fiction, many of the tales here end with an epiphany. The difference here is, the epiphanies always arrive too late. The characters are captured at the exact moment they fall through the cracks. (One story begins: “Let’s say things stop working out for you.” By paragraph’s end, it’s no longer hypothetical. And it's a short paragraph.) Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son was published a few years earlier, and I think that, for a time (as with Raymond Carver the previous decade), any fiction with protagonists on the margins of society was measured by the Jesus’ Son yardstick and found wanting. Compared to these stories, though, the characters in Jesus’ Son are playing in a sandbox. There’s real hurt in A Stranger In This World, and the characters in “Pretty Judy” and “Junk” and “Blue Boy” aren’t headed to a better place, but Canty’s tough, elegant prose makes their journeys rewarding.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Meeting Evil

I’m the only fan of Thomas Berger’s Meeting Evil (from 1992) that I know of. Everyone who has read the book on my recommendation has reported disliking it. I sympathize. The book is an uneasy marriage of the thriller, serial killer division (think Charlie Starkweather, not John Wayne Gacy) and classic farce (hero attempting to continue to play by the rules of polite society in the face of utter chaos). If you come for the thriller, the hero’s dilemmas will probably seem like unconscionable dithering; if you come for the farce, the villain’s mad cruelty may be too much to take. I remember loving every word of it.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Quick Change

Newspaperman Jay Cronley wrote a handful of funny novels that were made it into fitfully-amusing movies. Quick Change is the best of the lot in a walk. A brilliant bank heist is followed by a spectacularly-botched getaway. Everyone’s nastier than in the Bill Murray film, and they all have ulterior motives the movie barely hints at, especially the cab driver. The plot begs comparison to Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder books, but I think of Cronley as more the poor man’s Charles Portis.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Up in the Air

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.


I thought Up in the Air by Walter Kirn would make a good Forgotten Book. I read the hardcover after reading the NYT review and before the book, still new, disappeared from the front table of bookstores on 9/11 (or days afterward), due to this jacket art:



A quick Internet search for the above image, however, yields the news that the book is being adapted into a film by Jason Reitman, director of the recent Juno and, previously, of a (middling, I thought) adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking.

Anyway, there’s still time for a crack at the book, before the story hits the big screen.

Here is what I remember: our narrator, employed by some mega-corp, circles the globe, firing people for a living. He is, by his own testimony, both contented participant in and delighted observer of this seemingly-numbing hamster-wheel of airport lounges, hotel rooms, USA Today and glass office towers. (His discursions on the beauty of different facets of this world are like a comedic antidote to Don DeLillo.)

This façade begins to show some cracks, though. Why is our man so distant with his family? Why is he interviewing with another firm? And where are his air miles disappearing to?

Kirn makes a lot of comedy out of the character’s insistence that homogenization creates kinship – and makes the guy such good-natured company that you might catch yourself nodding along, right up until Kirn pulls the rug out.

Currently Available in paperback, with this cover:

Friday's Forgotten Book: Island

As with last Friday’s Forgotten Book, I read Thomas Perry’s Island twenty years ago, don’t currently own a copy, and apologize for any errors in fact.

Husband-and-wife con artists, on the lam from Miami mobsters after the brush-off phase of a successful long con goes awry, run aground on an unmapped sandbar somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.

A few chapters later, after spreading around some of the ill-gotten green, they’ve established their own country.

Before long, their man-made island nation has been turned into a well-appointed paradise, and some of the world’s older nations begin to take notice -- and the real trouble begins…

Island (1987) is long out-of-print, and seems to have redheaded-stepchild status among Thomas Perry’s books (there’s no mention of it on the author’s website); his books since have been leaner -- paragons of the means-business thriller -- but I also enjoyed his earlier, shaggier novels, and especially this forgotten one, immensely.

I think it’d make a good summer reading material suggestion for the reading-averse, too. Fans of the television series Lost, or of the Sims, might take to the story.

Hell, there’s a little something for everyone: a long-con caper, angry mobsters, angrier banana-republic strongmen, the CIA, mercenaries good and bad, and the screwball-comedy chemistry of the couple/protagonists. And it all ends up somewhere unexpected…well, I never expected the ending, which takes “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and twists it into a balloon animal.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Freaks' Amour

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.





Tom de Haven's Freaks' Amour: Twenty-some years ago, someone loaned me their copy, I read it in two sittings, then looked for a copy in every used bookstore I set foot in, for many years, never finding one.

Then I went to work in a bookstore, and anyone I described the novel to said, angrily: "Oh, that sounds just like Geek Love," which was inevitably their favorite book of all time. (Apart from the title, they sound nothing alike.)

Consequently I stopped talking or thinking about Freaks' Amour, even neglecting to look for it when ABE arrived on the scene.

Here is what I remember: The book is a first novel, published in 1979. The male narrator has a twin brother; they were conceived on their parents' wedding night, during a nuclear incident in New Jersey. The boys, and eventually most of their generation, have been born deformed due to the fallout.

[1979 was, of course, the year of the Three Mile Island incident. Did that hurt the book's chances for finding readers? (It didn't hurt the box office of The China Syndrome.)]

The freaks and the normals live in a segregated society. The narrator yearns to be Normal; his twin brother is a leader of an underground Freak movement pushing for a revolution. Intrigue ensues.

And then there's the goldfish eggs.

And the live sex shows.

Tom de Haven went on to write the 'Derby Dugan' books, among others. I've picked up his stuff, but nothing has ever really grabbed me the way Freaks' Amour did. He spoke a bit about the genesis of the book in an online interview of recent vintage:

After getting my master’s degree in 1973, I went to work in New York City as an editor for a number of men’s magazines (Sir!, Mr. and Man to Man) owned by Adrien Lopez, father of naturalist/novelist Barry Lopez. This was that deliciously cockeyed era when “porn” briefly had a lot of cachet (the era of Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones, etc.) and I was assigned to write articles about “the industry.” I met most of the directors and “stars” of X-rated films and from that experience (weirdly enough) sprang my first novel, Freaks’ Amour, a fantasy about a group of mutants living in Jersey City, two of whom make their living by performing live sex shows for “normal” people.

That book, published in 1979, enjoyed a fairly long life as a “cult novel,” to the extent that as late as the early 1990s it was regularly optioned for a film. (The last time it was, it was optioned by Alex Proyas, director of The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot, and I spent two years working with him on a screenplay, which of course was never produced.)

There are copies available on ABE, if your local library doesn't have one, and if you are curious. I'm going to look for a copy right now, to see if it's as endlessly inventive as I remember it to be, and you should find out for yourself.

Unless you're one of those Geek-Love-won't-listen-to-reason types...

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Art of Losing

Keith Dixon’s The Art of Losing was published just a year ago, but since I can easily foresee a reader making it their pick for Patti Abbott’s Forgotten Books project sometime in, say, 2021, I thought I’d strike first -- while the book is still readily available.

I’m still bewildered that the book never received any mention in any of the places I look for news of books in the mystery/crime genre. It’s slim, swift, criminally-minded, and as dark as they come.

Degenerate gamblers hatch a harebrained scheme to take some money from some bad, bad men; the plan fails, but too late to do anyone any good, and one of the plotters turns out to be a weak sister.

Sounds familiar, but it's not.

The characters buy into the scheme with the same confidence they would have betting their rent--it probably won't work, but it might. The bookmaker's disgust for their clientele has never been so well captured. And that weak sister? I can't think of another character in a noir who cracks the way this guy cracks--leading to the finale, which left me with the deep Catholic jitters.

I've read a lot of books in the year since I read this, but none better.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Lightning On The Sun

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.


The aptly-titled, first-and-last novel Lightning On The Sun was published less than ten years ago, got some attention due more to author Robert Bingham’s fatal heroin overdose months earlier than to the novel’s considerable merit, and faded from view. I think it a fine, overlooked novel.

Bingham drew on his literary idols Graham Greene and Robert Stone, and on his time as a journalist in Cambodia (and, yes, as a heroin user), for this tale of nihilistic young Americans making an ill-conceived bid to cut themselves in on the drug trade.

The story is a bit loose to really work as a thriller, but it is thrilling. The live-wire narrative voice and the sense of doom are what stay with you: it’s like listening to that friend who’s sharper than you’ll ever be but will never profit from it, because all that his intellect can do is find the bitter joke, and the corruption, in everything.