The Fan Man (Vintage Contemporaries)

Rating:
Summary: Dorty Dorty Dorty
Review: What a wondrous cosmic swirling jukebox of a novel. Kotzwinkle creates a wonderfully convincing outlaw/drifter/jester character in Horty Badorties, and what is better, he does it without resorting to any of the hackneyed tricks that writers use to convince you that their character really is crazy or brilliant or whatever. Badorties has no long-suffering friend or wearied ex-teacher whose reactions manipulate the reader's impression of Badorties. And thank the Muses, because it is Badorties' own extraordinarily powerful reactions to the things in his life that enchant the reader, his belief that any of the ten million elements in his apartment hold the key to a musical epiphany, and his consequent inability to commit to any one single course of action. Perhaps my favorite bit is when he is hungry and is unable to actually purchase some food, because of the beautiful portraits he draws himself of a different meal somewhere else. This book is a positive good in American literature, which is so often a zero-sum game.