2016/04/05 - Bucky F*cking Dent

I was lucky enough to get this ARC today and I am ridiculously giddy over it. @davidduchovny #davidduchovny pic.twitter.com/zn3rYkEty0

— Rayna (@MomsNotAll) 1 outubro 2015

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Key Literary Titles from Duchovny, Hellenga, Jane Hamilton, & More | Fiction Previews, Apr. 2016, Pt. 1

Duchovny, David. Bucky F*cking Dent. Farrar. Apr. 2016. 304p. ISBN 9780374110420. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780374714765. CD: Macmillan Audio. LITERARY




A quirky but heartfelt fable like his New York Times best-selling Holy Cow, this new work by duchovnyGolden Globe Award–winning actor Duchovny features Carter administration–era Ivy Leaguer Ted Fullilove, who sells peanuts at Yankee Stadium while churning out multiple drafts of (he wishes) the Great American Novel. But when estranged dad Marty announces that he is dying of cancer, Ted returns home and seeks to raise Marty’s spirits by creating the illusion that his beloved but foundering Red Sox are on a winning streak. Good writing? Let’s remember that Duchovny nearly got his doctorate in English from Yale.



Gonzales, Manuel. The Regional Office is Under Attack! Riverhead. Apr. 2016. 416p. ISBN 9781594632419. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780698139367. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. LITERARY/SF

In a dark and dangerous world, it’s good to have the Regional Office around, fielding its team of crack female assassins to keep everyone safe. But now the august Office is under fierce attack, with newbie assassin Rose, recruited by an Office malcontent, in the avant-garde; loyal Sarah is spearheading the defense. Sounds like standard sf fare, but rising star Gonzales’s debut story collection, The Miniature Wife, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, so you can expect literary tone and intent within the sf framework.

Hamilton, Jane. The Excellent Lombards. Grand Central. Apr. 2016. 288p. ISBN 9781455564224. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781455564217. lib. ebk. ISBN 9781455594092. hamiltonjaneDownloadable: Hachette Audio. LITERARY/FAMILY LIFE

Hamilton’s The Book of Ruth (1988) and A Map of the World (1994) were both PEN Faulkner Award winners and Oprah’s Book Club picks, and both were adapted for the screen, small and large, respectively. Here Hamilton revisits the Midwest farm setting that her fans know and love, introducing teenage Mary Frances “Frankie” Lombard. Frankie adores her family’s sunlit apple orchard and her criss-crossed family itself. But she knows that good things cannot last—not everyone in the family has stayed on the land—and the novel shows her facing facts and growing up. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Hellenga, Robert. The Truth About Death: And Other Stories. Bloomsbury USA. Apr. 2016. 256p. ISBN 9781455564224. $26. SHORT STORIES

Hellenga is a real reader’s writer, winning committed fans with intelligent and emotionally grounded novels ranging from The Sixteen Pleasures to The Confessions of Frances Godwin; as the LJ review of Confessions says, “he deserves to be more widely known.” This collection of short fiction ranges widely, with the title novella summing up the mood: undertaker Simon embalms his father, contemplating his own death; his mother says good-bye to her husband in the basement cooler; and the dog, Maya, a sensitive greeter at the funeral home, communicates some important truths to Simon’s wife. Suggesting the light twisting of a dark subject, a plate of spaghetti cacio e pepe, which Simon eats while dining with an undertaker in Rome, figures in the plot.

Lynch, Jim. Before the Wind. Knopf. Apr. 2016. 304p. ISBN 9780307958983. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780307958990. LITERARY
Lynch has won some nice honors—e.g., the Indies Choice Honor Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award—plus appreciative reviews in venues like the New York Times lynchand the Daily Beast; Border Songs, a tender, incisive look at the divisions among us, is a personal favorite. Now it’s breakout time. The Johannssens are a great sailing family famed for designing, building, and racing sailboats. But while 31-year-old Josh devotes himself to sailboat repair, siblings Ruby and Bernard have made some very big waves by moving far away from the family’s Puget Sound base. All the Johannssens reunite, however, to sail an historic, family-built vessel in a key race, and, not surprisingly, some salty, stinging revelations come out. Lots of promotion and an East Coast–West Coast tour.

Smith, Dominic. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. Sarah Crichton: Farrar. Apr. 2016. 304p. ISBN 9780374106683. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780374714048. CD/downloadable: Macmillan Audio. LITERARY/HISTORICAL

A Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of several fellowships both here and in his native Australia (he now lives in Austin, TX), Smith crafts a novel about three individuals connected over centuries by a single painting. In 1631, Sara de Vos is the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke’s in Holland. Now, her only surviving painting belongs to a wealthy descendant of the original owner, though it was forged by celebrated art historian vestalEllie Shipley in her desperate youth, when she needed to pay the rent. That’s a problem, because she’s currently curated a show on Dutch women painters. Luscious-sounding, and I’m hearing good things.

Vestal, Shawn. Daredevils. Penguin Pr. Apr. 2016. 320p. ISBN 9781101979891. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9781101979914. LITERARY

As winner of 2014’s PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize for his story collection, Godforsaken Idaho, Vestal can be expected to bring sharp literary skills to a plot reflecting current events, though it is set in the 1970s. When 15-year-old Loretta is caught sneaking from her bedroom to meet a lad who’s not Mormon, her righteously indignant parents marry her off to Dean Harder, a far-from-gentle fundamentalist who already has a wife and children. Then Loretta catches the eye of Harder’s teenage nephew Jason, and the two dare to escape from their closed-in world, which makes for a real pins-and-needles road-trip novel. Like Idaho, but in a bigger way, this book contemplates issues of faith, the meaning of masculinity, and the myths of the American West.

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Bucky F*cking Dent: A Novel Audio CD – Audiobook, CD, Unabridged


Kindle         Price  $14.55

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Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American novel, and spends the waning malaise-filled days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent.

When Ted hears the news that his estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, he immediately moves back into his childhood home, where a whirlwind of revelations ensues. The browbeating absentee father of his youth is living to make up for lost time, but his health dips drastically whenever his beloved Red Sox lose. And so, with help from a crew of neighborhood old-timers and the lovely Mariana--Marty's Nuyorican grief counselor--Ted orchestrates the illusion of a Sox winning streak, enabling Marty and the Red Sox to reverse the Curse of the Bambino and cruise their way to World Series victory. Well, sort of.

David Duchovny's richly drawn Bucky F*cking Dent is a story of the bond between fathers and sons, Yankee fans and the Fenway faithful, and grapples with the urgent need to find our story in an age of irony and artifice. Culminating in that fateful moment in October of '78 when the meek Bucky Dent hit his way into baseball history with the unlikeliest of home runs, this tragicomic novel demonstrates that life truly belongs to the losers--that the long shots are the ones worth betting on.

Bucky F*cking Dent is a singular tale that brims with the hilarity, poignancy, and profound solitude of modern life.

Amazon.com

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Bucky F*cking Dent
A Novel
David Duchovny
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1.

Jose Canucci. That’s what they called him at work. Like he was half Latin and half Italian. Apparently Italian on his father’s side. What part of the boot might the Canuccis hail from? No idea. Maybe his mother was a beautiful Puerto Rican woman from Spanish Harlem. Fuck, that would be funny. His father would have loved that. But was Canucci actually a real name? He didn’t know. They didn’t even pronounce it properly. The fans didn’t say it right up here. They said Can-you-see. The double c pronounced as s. It wasn’t his name anyway. His name was Ted Fullilove. Theodore Lord Fenway Fullilove. Talk about a fucked-up handle. Some frustrated poet at Ellis Island must have jotted down his Russian forebear’s Filinkov or Filipov or Filitov as Fullilove. He went by Ted. Except at work. At work, he was Jose. Or Mr. Peanut.

Maybe he should get a monocle. Like Mr. Peanut, the cartoon advertising mascot of the Planters peanut company. Ted’s dad had been an advertising man, and he wondered if his father had fathered Mr. Peanut as well. Maybe he and Mr. Peanut were half brothers. Mr. Peanut was a friendly stiff in a top hat, a hybrid with the body of a peanut, a walking stick, and a monocle. A sentient nut.

Mr. Peanut looked like a science experiment gone wrong from one of those cheap B movies that played during rain-out Chiller Theatre on WPIX, channel 11. You know, like The Fly? “Help me. Help me.” That was the big line from The Fly. Vincent Price with the body of a fly and the head of a Vincent Price. Was it Vincent Price’s head? He thought maybe not. Doesn’t really matter. Okay, probably matters to Vincent Price, but not to Ted. Something about “help me, help me” moved Ted, though. The sheer, naked need. The first thing a child learns to say, maybe. After “Mommy” and “Daddy” and “more.” Help me. Help me. Please somebody help me.

Mr. Peanut needed help. He had the dimpled gray-beige peanut torso, insect stick legs, and bad eyesight. In one eye, at least. No balls to speak of, sexless, a eunuch, and he couldn’t see or walk without the use of a cane. Help that dude. And why the top hat? He’s asking for it. Refile all these thoughts in another sleeve of index cards—inside joke filed under H for Help me. That could work. But it was already getting cross-referenced, cross-filed, and confusing. He wished he had a girlfriend. He did not have the body of a peanut and did have balls and needs, emotional, physical, whatever. All sorts of crazy conflicting needs sparking off in all directions, like when a tailpipe drops onto the road and makes fireworks and that bad sound. Girlfriend/Tailpipe. I should really have a pen with me at all times, he thought. Angry with himself because these things, these thoughts do get lost. His mother always told him that if it was important, he would remember it. But that’s not true. In fact, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the most important things we forget, or at least try to forget. What did Nietzsche say? We remember only that which gives us pain? That’s not quite the same thought, but same ballpark. Through the perilous fight.

A ballpark of thoughts. Yankee Stadium with a bunch of thinking on the field. And in the seats. Ted’s mind was a full stadium of half-baked notions during the seventh-inning stretch. Bob Sheppard’s transatlantic patrician voice—“Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to first base, now playing for the Yankees, replacing Chris Chambliss, the young German with the impressive mustaches, Friedrich Nietzsche.” Phil Rizzuto would have fun with that. How come when you’re trying to be universal and all, there’s usually a clause in the statement like “that which”? Clumsiness of diction was like an announcement of profundity. That’s not a bad thought, that is a thought which is not bad.

Ted often forgot he didn’t have a woman. And in those moments he was probably happier than in the moments he remembered that he didn’t. Girlfriend. File that under U for “Unlikely” or G for “Go fuck yourself, Ted.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been with a woman, and for that forgetfulness he was actually thankful. Gallantly streaming. But even though the thought was an empty placeholder for a card, the ache, the lack was inchoate, and real. Ted felt life passing him by. He was now into his thirties. He was nearing the all-star break in the season of his life. Spring training a distant memory. Ted felt the old panic start to rise in his gut like when a pitcher who had command the whole game suddenly gets wild, loses control, as they say. Somewhere in his mind, a manager made a gesture for time-out at the umpire and walked to the mound to calm his pitcher. Ted flexed his right shoulder. He would be throwing soon and he wanted to be loose.

And the rockets’ red glare. Ted laughed at himself and then looked around nervously. Laughing during the National Anthem was a no-no. You didn’t have to put your hand over your heart the way Ted was told he had to by management, like some kind of ROTC crazy, but you shouldn’t talk or laugh. It was disrespectful to the military, apparently. And the Founding Fathers. And Jimmy Carter. Who is Mr. Peanut in real life! The peanut farmer from Georgia. Ted loved a full circle like that. Who doesn’t, really? People liked circles, closure, the tiny mind making patterns against the big chaos. Mr. Peanut was now the president of his country. The malaise days. Help him. Help him.

You could start cheering during the last line—Jose, does that star-spangled ba-an-ner yet wa-ave. O’er the la-and of the freeeeeeeeee … But not before. Before was disrespectful. It was a fine line that everyone, 60,000 people when Boston was in town, just knew intuitively. Like don’t stare at other people in an elevator, look at the numbers flashing. No eye contact. The intuitive rules of the world that were a mystery only to retards, psycho killers, and children.

The old joke is that the last words of the national anthem are “play ball!” An oldie, but a goodie. The impossible-to-sing “song” came to an end, and the noise of the crowd swelled like it was one happily anxious beast. The game was about to begin, and it was Africa-hot up here in the cheap seats, the blue seats. It was 80 percent Latino in Ted’s peanut dominion, 55 percent Puerto Rican, 25 percent Dominican, and about 20 percent other. The other were mostly Irish and Italian. All his people. It was easy to think of these as the “cheap seats,” and, for sure, they were so far removed from the field of play that there was a discernible lag between the sight of a ball being hit and the crack of the bat. Like a badly dubbed Japanese film. But rather than removed, Ted liked to think of the vantage point as Olympian, that they were all gods on high watching the ant-sized humans play their silly games. So this is where he worked. Yankee Stadium throwing peanuts to mostly men who thought it was funny to call him “Jose” like the first words of the Spanglish version of the national anthem, or Mr. Peanut. Some even called him Ted.

He would rather not to be called Ted. Though he liked his job and it paid the bills, kinda, while he wrote, he was a little ashamed that a man his age, with his education, New York private school, Ivy League, had to throw legumes at people to make ends meet. Yet he actually preferred a job like this that was so far away from what he “should” be doing, falling so spectacularly short of any expectation, that people might think he was doing it ’cause he was a “character,” or ’cause he loved it, or that he was one of those genius, irreverent motherfuckers who thumbed his nose at the world and just generally didn’t give a shit. Rather than be thought of as a failure, which is how he thought of himself, he liked to be thought of as an eccentric. That quirky dude with a BA in English literature from Columbia who works as a peanut vendor in Yankee Stadium while he slaves away on the great American novel. He is so counterculture. He is so down with the workers and the proles. I love that guy. Wallace Stevens selling insurance. Nathaniel Hawthorne punching the clock at the customs house. Jack London among the great unwashed with a handful of nuts in his hand.

Even so, he took pride in his accuracy. He was not a good athlete, as his father used to remind him daily growing up. He threw “like a girl,” the old man said. And it was true, he did not have Reggie Jackson’s arm, or even Mickey Rivers’s chicken wing. If Ted was gonna get a candy bar named after him, it would probably be the Chunky. But over the years, he had honed his awkward throwing motion into a slapstick cannon of admirable accuracy. Even though he looked like he was doing a combo of waving goodbye and slapping frantically at a mosquito, he could consistently hit a raised hand from twenty rows away. The fans loved his uniquely ugly expertise and loved to give him a tough target and celebrate when he nailed it. He could go behind the back. He could go through the legs. His co-worker, Mungo, he of the Coke-bottle lenses and bowling forearm guard, who broke five feet only because of the orthopedic four-inch rubber heel on his left club foot black shoe, sold the not-always-so-cold beer in Ted’s section, and would always keep fantasy stats on Ted’s delivery percentage: 63 attempts, 40 hits, 57 within 3 feet. That kind of stuff. Like batting average, slugging percentage, and ERA for vendors.

Catfish Hunter was pitching today. Ted dug that name. Baseball had a rich tradition of ready-made awesome monikers. Van Lingle Mungo. Baby Doll Jacobson. Heinie Manush. Chief Bender. Enos Slaughter. Satchel Paige. Urban Shocker. Mickey Mantle. Art Shamsky. Piano Legs Hickman. Minnie Minoso. Cupid Childs. Willie Mays. Like a history of the United States told only through names, a true American arithmoi, a Book of Numbers. It was a strange year, though, because the Boston Red Sox, longtime Yankee rivals, but in effect more like a tragicomic foil to the reigning kings, the Washington Generals to the Yankees’ Harlem Globetrotters, were having a great year and looking like they would finally break the curse of the Babe. The Sox had traded Babe Ruth, already the best player in the game, in 1918 to the Yankees for cash. The owner of the Sox, Harry Frazee, wanted to bankroll a musical or something. Was it No, No, Nanette? Ruth went on to become an American hero, a hard-living, hot-dog-inhaling Paul Bunyan in pinstripes who led the Yankees to many a pennant and World Series victory, whose success had conjured Yankee Stadium out of the barren hinterlands of the Bronx: The House That Ruth Built in 1923, where Ted stood today. And the Sox had not won since. Not one pennant. Sixty years of futility looking up in the standings at the hairy ass of the Yankees.

It was mid-June, but already hotter than July. The peanuts did fly, the beer did flow, and the Catfish did hurl. During the few lulls in the game when people were not calling for him, Ted would usually grab the dull sawed-off pencil from behind his right ear and jot down stray thoughts. To be filed later. Alphabetically, of course. Thoughts for the novel he was presently working on, or the next one, or the one that he had all but given up on last year. Writing was not the problem, finishing was. Works in progress with titles like “Mr. Ne’er-Do-Well” (536 pages), “Wherever There Are Two” (660 pages of an outline), “Death by Now” (1,171 pages weighing over 12 pounds), or “Miss Subways” (402 pages and counting). All that would never see the light of day outside of Ted’s Bronx one-bedroom walk-up tenement apartment. Maybe today he would stumble upon a thought that would unleash the true word horde, that would unlock a puzzle, that would unblock him from himself, from his inability to compete and complete.

He remembered Coleridge, in the Vale of Chamouni, had written, “Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star…?” And that seemed to him the truest, saddest line in all of literature. Can you, man, find the poetry to keep the sun from rising, like a mountain, blocking its inevitable ascent for a few more moments? Can you, who call yourself a writer, find the words that will have an actual influence on the real and natural world? Magic passwords—shazzam, open sesame, scoddy waddy doo dah—warriors lurking in the Trojan horse of words. The implicit answer to Coleridge’s question was: Hell, no. If the answer were yes, he would never have asked the question. The writer will never make something happen in the world. In fact, the act of writing may be in itself the final admission that one is powerless in reality. Shit, that would surely suck.

Ted was thinking about his own powerlessness and ol’ S. T. Coleridge, that opium-toking, Xanadu-loving, Alps-hiking freakazoid, as he sat scribbling on a paper bag some names that might work as magic charms to make time or a woman stay, to spark a story, to make him the man he wanted to be—Napoleon Lajoie Vida Blue Thurman Munson Open Sesame …

The game passed by in its own sweet timelessness, and then it was over. Boston 5, New York 3. Another Yankee loss in this strange-feeling year.


Copyright © 2016 by King Baby, Inc.


Macmillan

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We are so f*cking excited for David Duchovny's new book Bucky F*cking Dent! Out next week on on Opening Day, April f*cking 5th. Listen to his podcast with Bill Simmons to find out more! ****Link in profile. #fsgbooks #davidduchovny #buckydent #openingday

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