Bigfoot Dreams [Paperback]

Francine Prose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1998

Finally back in print, "Bigfoot Dreams"--a hilarious comedy of American psychology and pop culture. Vera, the bright, edgy heroine, works for a sleazy supermarket tabloid writing about UFO sightings, miracle cures, and the ever-popular Bigfoot. But then one of the stories Vera invented turns out to be true in ways she could never have dreamed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

You can walk into Vera Perl's Brooklyn apartment house and pick her out of a clutch of tenants: you will recognize her charged, speculative voice. She writes for a yellow rag called This Week, thinks in absurd, alliterative headlines and tailors her made-up stories to photographs taken as if by chance by her colleague Solomon. The fun begins when Solomon snaps two kids selling lemonade on a lawn in Flatbush, and Vera endows them with names and a psychiatrist father, and the water used in the lemonade with astonishing curative qualitiesall of which, except possibly the last, turns out to be true. The paper is slapped with a lawsuit, Vera is fired, her estranged husband Lowell flies in from Los Angeles for a night of love and leaves several days later with their daughter Rosalie. This gives Vera the chance, via a Cryptobiological Society meeting at the Grand Canyon, to pursue her dreams of the eponymous Bigfoot, a monster whose footprints are the size of bathtubs and whose arms shatter buildings with a single swipe. Prose's (Hungry Hearts account of these high jinks conveys every scene with psychedelic gusto, an authenticity of language and setting, and an acute sense of character. This is a lollapalooza of a novel, which keeps the reader hanging on every word and conjures believing out of make-believe.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This "lively and upbeat" story follows the life of a tabloid journalist whose professional and family life has gotten so screwy that she dreams the "legendary creature will rescue her" (LJ 4/1/86). She is redeemed somewhat when one of her goofy stories turns out to be true.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Owl Publishing Company (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080504860x
• ISBN-13: 978-0805048605
• ASIN: 080504860X
• Product Dimensions: 3.3 x 0.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,488,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen books of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Francine Prose lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bigger Than Life, February 7, 2005

By 

G. Bestick (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bigfoot Dreams (Paperback)

I picked up Bigfoot Dreams because I liked Prose's novel The Blue Angel. Blue Angel took a situation that seemed absolutely played out - aging professor in midlife throes has an affair with one of his female students - and made something astringent and revealing out of it.

Initially published in 1986, Bigfoot Dreams seems at first to be Ur-Chicklit. Consider the archetypes: our heroine, Vera, is a plucky single mom with an endearing but precocious ten year old daughter; Vera's parents are old lefties (Dad fought in the Spanish Civil War.); she has an off-again, on-again marriage to Lowell, A Good Man Who Just Can't Seem to Commit; her best friend is lovable but prone to crazy impulses; two delightful gay guys live next door; and she has the requisite quirky job, as a reporter for the type of tabloid that specializes in Elvis, Bigfoot and UFO sightings.

We follow Vera around New York City during a muggy summer of discontent. There's a lot of day to day life - some readers might think too much. We watch Vera chop vegetables, take the subway, empty the garbage, read the Sunday New York Times, sit through her daughter's ballet recital. In between, she engages in unfulfilling mating rituals with a coworker, gets in trouble at work over the bizarre coincidence of having a story she made up turn out to be true, worries about her parents and daughter, and pines for Lowell. Vera is a first wave feminist, at the point where the original proposition - we can have it all - is getting ground up in the day to day struggle, but no new synthesis has emerged.

Judging from the Amazon reader reviews, several reviewers found Vera a claustrophobic consciousness to travel in for a couple hundred pages. Part of the problem is the book's uneven tone. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Prose is satirizing or sympathizing. The reader's left wondering which emotional card to put down.

But Bigfoot Dreams is not so easily dismissed. As in The Blue Angel, Prose is mining everyday life to extract fresh meaning from it. In Vera's personal struggles, and in her tabloid stories, there's a tension between the dense, gravitational pull of the day to day and the desire to transcend it. Vera's job at the tabloid brings her in contact with people who are desperate to believe the stories she makes up. The America her readers live in seems as sun-blasted and empty as anything Camus' Stranger experienced on his African beach. Vera's personal journey leads her to the place where she realizes that one of the reasons she's so good as a tabloid writer is because her aspirations aren't so different from those of her readers: she wants a life that's bigger and richer than the one she's ended up with. Vera's made up stories have a perverse integrity. She'd rather invent lies and know she's doing it than settle for truths that are half-baked, facile or destructive.

Out of the particularity of Vera's life emerges a general portrait of the urban feminist intellectual, caught between the old certitudes she grew up with and murky new truths seen, like Bigfoot, only in unsatisfactory glimpses. The struggle to pin down those truths is worthy of our respect, and, despite its meandering plot, so is Bigfoot Dreams.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Redemption in the unexpected?, March 30, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bigfoot Dreams (Paperback)

Francine Prose is a delight to read because she describes so insightfully and oftentimes humorously the rich texture and nuances of relationships that we meet in her characters. The main issue in Bigfoot Dreams surrounds how we deal with the unexpected. Today, the search for many of us is for a "sign" or for the "unexpected". But what do we do when we finally meet it? We act ungraciously (the Greens' when there is even the remotest hint they may be miraculously bringing comfort to others). We shut it out (Vera's employer cannot deal with it although the obvious irony is they spend their lives encouraging people to meet the unexpected). We go back to the comfort of our drugs or the lives we have created (Louise) We are cynical or run from it as even Vera does when she might have encountered Big Foot. But where is redemption in all this? Redemption comes for Vera when she finally embraces the unexpected and sees life as an adventure in which we can really be touched in ways that may even be right here in the present in the everyday tapestry of our relationships.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Life in the absurd lane, February 22, 2003

By 

L. Blumenthal "lynn" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bigfoot Dreams (Paperback)

Having once been a newspaper reporter, I simply had to read this book. Immediately, I was delighted by the story of a reporter who's hired to make stories up for a sleazy tabloid rag. Here's a smart and funny way of turning the usual newspaper story on its ear: instead of looking for truth, the heroine avoids truth at all costs.

Along the way, we meet some fabulous characters: her blossoming pre-teen daughter, her ne-er do well absent hubby, a crazy hippy pal, parents who live to criticize, a love-torn co-worker. It all works well, especially when the Vera the reporter invents a story that turns out to be true. (And don't you love the name? Vera, which means true.)

The only reason I give this book three stars instead of five, is that the story complely fizzles out at the end. Fired for telling the truth, Vera goes on a long journey to get her life together, tries to reconnect with her husband, and essentially learns nothing. Unfortuntately, ths is Prose's worst flaw. She simply does not want to end the story, and certainly not in a satisfying way. Only in BLUE ANGEL, does she come to a real, albeit depressing, conclusion.

But for the first two-thirds of this book, it's beautifully and observantly written.