Customer Reviews

Bigfoot Dreams

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I tried. I really, really tried. Bigfoot Dreams missed the mark, despite my attempts to enjoy myself. At first glance, the premise of this novel had lots of potential. A woman who makes up stories for a weekly tabloid finds herself in one heck of a predicament -- after five years on the job and no problems thus far, one of her stories turns out to be true. My imagination ran wild with me...what story was it? How strange would that be? What will happen to her? The author did elaborate on these questions, but my expectations far outweighed the results.

As for the writing itself, Francine Prose did a very good job. Much better than I could ever do, so immediately she gets two thumbs up. I believe the problem I had with Bigfoot Dreams was the story itself. It was a thinker-novel, not as cut-and-dried as one might think. And while sometimes this can be good, I was disappointed in this case. Bigfoot Dreams seemed like it would be a riot; in the end, I was bored to tears and wondering where all the fun went. A quirky subject deserves a quirky explanation, but there was too much psychological babble going on.

Best parts about this book: the main character, Vera's, job -- how fun it would be to sit around making up stories all day; Vera's friend, Louise -- I was far more interested in Louise's antics as a former member of a cult who wore all white and ate salad every day; and also Vera's on-again, off-again husband, Lowell -- an Arkansas hippie (need I say more?). Bigfoot Dreams had vast potential to be so funny, crazy, and imaginative, but Ms. Prose weighed it down with too much reality. I'll try again, though. Maybe Blue Angel will be more suited for me.

The nominal plot of Bigfoot Dreams is about synchronicity. Vera, a reporter for a Weekly World News type tabloid, accidentally writes a true story and loses her job because of it. As a premise, this is a good one, but the book isn't really organized around that particular event. In fact, it isn't really organized around anything. It's kind of a loose, exploratory post-feminist novel, a portrait of the new world order in which women work and men don't and children are more adult than their parents.

There are many pleasures in this book. I didn't turn a page without encountering an apt, charming and fresh description. I liked Vera, Lowell and Rose as a family. Vera's job is hilarious, because we're offered a funny filter for her perception of daily events, we see exactly where all these crackpot stories come from, the bits and pieces she mixes up to produce "I MARRIED BIGFOOT" or "JESUS WRECKED MY CAR." But as Oscar Wilde said, life imitates art more than art imitates life, and when Vera starts to hear echoes of her stories in her life, it gets spooky. There are strange convergences that might be coincidence, but what if they are actually more?

Which brings me to my problem with the book. I wanted it to add up to more. I am glad I read the book, and loved her visit to the west, but I felt like I was waiting for something that never quite arrived. Fans of this book might really love Connie Willis's Bellwether, which is heavier on the social satire than Bigfoot Dreams, but hilarious and very nicely crafted.

"Bigfoot Dreams" is a distinctly American book about hope and grace and popular culture. Although it includes a smattering of outdated references to fantasy games and smoking aboard aircraft, it has aged very well since its initial publication in 1986. Vera, Rosie, Solomon, and the other characters here seem as real as your neighbors. Bigfoot emerges as both the quintessential tabloid story and the catalyst for musings on what motivates people. Among other things, this book tells why we read tabloids so avidly in supermarket lines. Its central conceit, that fiction writers sometimes have a firmer grasp on reality than they intend, pays inventive homage to the aphorism that truth is stranger than fiction. Along the way, we're treated to observations about motherhood, friendship, first dates, and life (especially in New York and Seattle). We also learn about cryptobiology. I'll remember this book as a gentle but exhilarating read, very different from but no less deserving than "Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe's portrait of New York in the eighties.

Vera Perl is the ace reporter of the Brooklyn rag, This Weekly, a supermarket tabloid that specializes in making up absurd stories that would have made Kafka want to become a rapper. Elvis sightings are all right, but Vera's favorite stories involve Bigfoot, perhaps because her first headline news was: "I Married Bigfoot". Vera develops her stories from pictures taken by the tabloid's top photographer, Solomon.

When Solomon photographs a couple of kids selling lemonade, Vera puts the proper spin on it. She gives them false names, a phony psychiatrist of a dad, and endows the drink with mystical healing powers. The tabloid is sued, and subsequently Vera is blamed and fired. The vivacious Vera does not stay depressed very long as she decides to follow her dream by heading west and searching for the genuine Bigfoot.

BIGFOOT DREAM is a very humorous, often satirical novel that will be enjoyed by readers who want their prose to be concurrently jocular and thought-provoking. Vera is the obvious heir apparent (with a few missing generations) to Ralph Kramden, that fifties Brooklyn schemer and dreamer. Anyone who gives Francine Prose a chance will owlishly come away delighted with the revelation that they have discovered a very talented author.

Harriet Klausner

I really liked the first two Francine Prose novels I read - "Blue Angel" and Household Saints" - and awarded each four stars. Unfortunately, I found "Bigfoot Dreams" to be a horse of a different color. Here, the focus remains on one quite unfocused character - Vera Perl, a 37 year old single mom who writes fictitious articles about Bigfoot and miracle cures for a magazine that makes the "National Enquirer" look downright authoritative. One of the more mundane articles that Vera writes turns out to be too close to the truth, which causes a resultantly unemployed Vera to embark on a sort of inner journey involving (along the way) her daughter, ex-husband, college roomate, and a group of "cryptobiologists" (it sounds more interesting than it is). But here's the problem. The author either bores the reader with the day-to-day minutia of Vera's life (like making a meal or visiting her parents), or futilely describes some experience which is supposed to be life-changing or meaningful. Honestly, I didn't really get what Prose was trying to tell us about Vera, or how Vera was supposedly learning something about herself. In fact, by the end of the book, Vera hasn't really learned anything at all, and even seems to have gotten worse (for instance, she starts smoking again). The little coincidences that pepper the story add up to a bunch of nothing.

Since I intend to read three more Francine Prose novels (which I'll review on this site), I'm very much hoping that "Bigfoot Dreams" is the author's nadir. I just don't think Prose really had a clear concept of what she wanted to write about, or who her main character (Vera) was supposed to be.

Never have I seen a midlife crisis so better portrayed. Vera is at a point where she questions her choices and her responsibilities. She is not insecure, she has just arrived at a time in her life where she does not have an ounce of self-righteousness left. She has gained perspective, and reviews every aspect of her life under the prism of maturity. She no longer cringes at her parents, but understands why they behave the way the do, partly because she sees how she behaves with her own daughter. She no longer gets mad at her deadbeat husband, because she understands why he acts the way he does. Although things are not going very well for her, especially when it comes to her work (after saving her company's ass), she keeps marching on, looking for answers.

And for those of you who complain about the ending, let me tell you something: you not always arrive at neatly wrapped answers with a cute bow on top. That's not the way reality works. Vera is on a journey, and she is still traveling towards her answers when the book ends. Deal with it.

If you like literary stories about jewish women in NY City going through crises of middle-age this book is for you. The tabloid stuff and cryptozoology stuff (Prose incorrectly uses the term cryptobiology) are poorly researched and mere window dressing. The meat of the book, if you want to call it that, consists of blow-by-blow metaphors describing the "heroine's" state of mind as she struggles to relate with her teen daughter, reconcile with her loser ex-husband, and quit smoking. The epiphany is baffling and more than a little unsatisfactory.