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Fan Man

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There has been a lot of counterculture literature since the rise of the Beat Generation in the 50s. Much of it fails to measure up to the standard of Kerouac, Ginsberg or Burroughs. There are some writers who have managed to rise up to the occasion with classic or near classic works. Terry Southern would be one that comes to mind. Another writer who has produced some fine works is William Kotzwinkle. Before, "E.T. The Extra-terrestial", Kotzwinkle was noted for producing counterculture literature. One of his most famous works is the 1974 novel "The Fan Man".

This novel chronicles the sleazy misadventures of the self absorbed hippie Horse Badorties. He is typical low life East Village for that time period, man. He knows the score and will always find the door for a quick out. He avoids things like rent and pays for commodities with rubber checks. Surely this is a time piece cause many of his ideals wouldn't fly in today's climate.

The title is derived from his continued attempts to be a salesman of small battery powered fans. He consistently uses them and tries to sell them in any store or business he enters into. It is all part of his grand scheme. He even envisions utilizing the fans in his Love Concert that will be presented at St Nancy's Church. (I am wondering if this is meant to be the famous St. Mark's Church in the East Village which conducted poetry readings for decades.)

Kotzwinkle endeavors to capture the thought process and speech pattern of an East Village post hippie lowbrow. In this, he is very successful. The narrative moves along in a hazy stream of consciousness. Horse Badorties is a slob who is no stranger to the herbal pleasures of Mother Nature. The novel begins with Horse waking up in his filthy pad. Kotzwinkle is very descriptive in detailing the encrusted, greasy condition of this pad. It would probably not be too appealing to squeamish stomachs. I found myself thinking, "Man, and I thought I was a slob." Horse Badorties is not only from another era, he seems to be from another universe.

Badorties is full of big ideas and cons. He doesn't pay the rent and destroys the pad with his junk and filth. He is trying to conduct a love concert which will feature a chorus of 15 year old girls, most of whom, he tries to bed down. He has music sheets which he claims is church music from hundreds of years ago. Suspension of disbelief is required to take seriously anything Horse Badorties says.

The narrative is written in the first person, and we get a lot of "mans" sprinkled throughout the text, man. Like, man, after awhile, it can get pretty unnerving, man. In this respect, it is similar to a novel like Huck Finn where Twain attempts to capture the slang and accents of 19th Century Missouri. Kotzwinkle is very successful in this endeavor. He manages to tap into that vein of consciousness from Badorties viewpoint. This can be frustrating to the reader. If you consider how annoying it can be to listen to a person who overuses the word man in their speech, man, well, it can be just as annoying reading this text. Some readers would probably get lost in trying to follow the narrative. You almost have to try to put yourself in Badorties shoes. That is not a pleasant proposition. Kotzwinkle is very successful in capturing this stream of consciousness.

My impression is that this book is meant more as an adieu to the hippie era and the summer of love mentality that the 60s rock exuded. This is really about the crash, man. This is when people began to drop out without tuning in or turning on. In reading the book, I get the sense that I am listening to the voice of a man whose time has passed. He is left to wallow, in his own words, in putrified wretchedness. There must have been quite a few real life people like Badorties populating the East Village during those years. Perhaps there still are a few dinosaurs and relics there today. All in all, this is a very amusing, entertaining and irreverent book, one that will certainly make you laugh. Yes, it's a fun book. Pick up a copy! Along with this novel I'd also like to recommend another East Village novel called The Losers' Club (Complete Restored Edition) by Richard Perez.

I can't very well say that I could relate to Horse Badorties and his many, many quirks. Although, I think we've all got a little bit of the Fan Man inside. William Kotzwinkle's perpetually-stoned main character invites his readers into his cluttered Horse Badorties pads, sharing with us his musical genius and many forms of health food (drugs), among other things.

The Fan Man is filled to the brim with pure random humor, making little sense to anyone but the Man himself. His obscene language, erratic shopping sprees, and quests for fifteen-year old runaway chicks make Horse a bonkers, yet irresistible kind of guy.

This book is made up entirely of his experiences, which he always seems to just barely make it through. For example, he sets his mind on getting the Today show to broadcast a live performance of his ongoing musical endeavor, the Love Chorus. In the process of getting this big goal accomplished, he falls asleep in a sinking boat in Central Park, pretends to have fallen down an elevator shaft, and somehow comes out beaming.

There is an immense feeling of contentment that Badorties absolutely exudes, even with all of his obvious problems bearing down on him. His landlord is desperate to evict him from his cockroach-infested apartment. He hasn't been laid in FAR too long, as he put it. But in Horse's eyes, the filth of his pad is artful, and any day now, he is bound to charm a fifteen-year old chick up to his place to smoke some banana flakes.

The most interesting element of this book is it's twisted philosophical value. Horse lives life without holding back. He does everything just as it pops into his head, if he's not distracted before he can. In some odd way, it seems that Horse sets an example of how we all wish we could live: carefree, on a constant high (whether it be by substances ingested or simply a mindset), and most of all, happy. No matter how many girls turn Horse down, he continues to hand out his sheet music to attractive young ladies on the street. No matter how much deadly Puerto Rican music may reach his ears, he always just pulls out the protective Commander Schmuck earflap hat and walks on.

Over the course of a few hundred pages, we get to know the Fan Man intimately, and I know I felt a very complacent satisfaction with how things are left, despite several loose ends. Kotzwinkle created an entirely lovable character that will most certainly drag you willingly through mountains of trash and laughter.

Okay, this is a weird book. And it's nice to add a weird book to your repetoire every once in a while; shake things up. Well. Horse Badorties, our hero, is a brain-fried crazy hippie in New York in the 70s. In this book you get to go on his tripped out journey as he gathers the detritus of civilization, from giant hot-dog stand umbrellas to old air-raid sirens, and passes through life. This book really just injects you into his mind. You are him, and you get to follow his strange, ADD thought processes. If this book delivers a lesson, it is just that Horse, strange as he is, is a survivor. Somehow, with no dependable source of income, he manages to get everything he wants. He gets an apartment, a trip to the inner workings of the Museum of Natural History, and a fantastic success of a Love Concert. Horse floats through life and for him nothing ever can go wrong. His perspective is very unique, and crazy, but none the less valuable. Buying two music boxes from a cheap-o toy store, he walks five yards from the store and they both break. Instead of being distressed by this, however, he is inspired. Now they are holy objects, their tiny clockwork dancers waiting for eternity for music that will never come. Now they play the music of Nirvana.

Also, you have to read this for the Dorky-Day chapter. Trust me. Just trust me.

I first read this book when I was about nine or ten. My mom and older sisters had already dog-eared our copy and finally saw fit to pass it down to me. I read it, laughed uproarously, and wasn't aware of 90% of the culture, drug, or sexual references in the book. I still found it funny enough to read repeatedly throughout middle adn high school, and throughout college and graduate. Of course, as I got older, I understood more and more and found The Fan Man to be as sad as it was funny.

Horse Badorties is a loser who knows he's a loser and this makes his life that much more poignant, hilarious, and pathetic. He's on the fast track going nowhere and intends to enjoy every moment of it. He's the burnout hippie who hasn't escaped his languishing identity; he's capable of great things, but never follows through. He's a skilled musician, a magnetic group leader, and a charismatic con artist, yet never takes himself seriously enough to achieve the bliss he's looking for -- until he gives up his main ambition to watch the sunset over the Hudson River.

Like the sunset, his contentment is also short lived and leads inevitably to his perpetual dark dissatisfaction with everything he does (with the exception of his girl's choir). Yet I still find myself laughing at him and with him. Every time I read this book.

Literature is like music: we don't all tap our feet to the same beat. So it is with William Kotzwinkle's "The Fan Man." If you like your literature fast and loose, upfront and far out, brilliantly written and well told -- but most of all, laugh-out-loud, falling over funny, buy this book sooner than later. Whatever you do, do notborrow it from me. I have loaned (read: given away) more copies than i can remember, since a friend opened my eyes to this piece in the mid-`70s. Today, "The Fan Man" sits on my desk -- not upon a shelf -- as inspiration for the imagination. It is evidence of what can be done with an idea. And, man, everytime i read a passage, i still howl.

We first meet out protagonist Horse Badorties in his pad, his " piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad". As he describes his pad, you wonder " how can someone live like this?". On the lower east side of Manhattan Horse's apartment is filled with garbage , sheet music, mold growing on his sofa (which he actually considers smoking) and other miscellaneous things that he randomly buys from vendors on the street. But as you get to know him he becomes endearing and slick.
Horse is a hippie who leads the kind of life we all wish we could. He always seems happy and the type of things that would make most of us have a panic attack, don't phase him at all. For example , his landlord kicks him out of his apartment because he hasn't paid the rent for six month , and Horse has no issues , because a few weeks ago his neighbor had moved out and gave Horse the key to return to the landlord, so he just moved in there. He does what ever comes to mind , weather it's getting some fried rice from china town, or buying the enormous umbrella from the hotdog vendor for ten dollars, when he has absolutely no use for it. Well, he tries to do what ever comes to mind, as long as his thought s don't get interrupted by something else he has or wants to do. And even though the reason he can always keep his cool is because he's always stoned, you find your self wishing you were the same way.
In this book we follow Horse around the city for a few weeks as he prepares for the "Love Chorus," concert. The Love Chorus is an all girls chorus, that Horse has been recruiting 15 year old girls for. Preparing for this is his main priority at the time. They will sing music composed by hose himself, because as it turns out he is a musical genius and can create music out of anything, as long as it doesn't involve the loathed violin. We follow Horse as he gets NBC to cover the concert, as well as when he pretends to be a maintenance worker to get a look at a huge fan in a museum.
Badorties is a good soul, who along his journey to live life to the fullest he makes other people happy. This is a book that I recommend every one read , I loved it from the first page. The end is perfect, you leave this book feeling like it was complete ,unlike many other books, even with the few loose ends it has.

This comic novel, set in the East Village of Manhattan, had me laughing right from the beginning. It may be read as a satire of the hippy generation, but I just find it incredible clever and ballsy. The protagonist's voice (who vaguely reminds me of Chong --from Cheech & Chong) is rendered perfectly. And it has an off-the-cuff, irreverent quality from start to finish that's exceedingly rare. It's a unconventional novel, unlike any you're likely to read. The only other book that comes to mind is Richard Perez's The Loser's Club, which is also set in the East Village, but even there the narrative is more straightforward being about a writer addicted to the personal ads. The Fan Man is the kind of a book which might be called a "cult classic" because no one who reads it will ever forget it. I strongly urge that you buy it! You'll laugh!

William Kotzwinkle is brilliant. He has an unerring ear for language, and he has ol' street hippie Horse Badorties down perfectly. I first read this aloud to my dorm-mates in 1981, and each night the crowd grew because of the uproarious laughter coming from the lounge (having grown up in New York or Miami helps with some of the accents). The next Kotzwinkle I read was Fata Morgana, and it too was brilliant, a period mystery utterly unlike Fan Man, but with the same air of mystical goings-on just out of the protagonist's direct sight. My impression is that anything William Kotzwinkle writes will be worth reading, until they finally cart him off to the funny farm...

I've never had the experience of meeting a person like Horse Badorties. Coming form a culture like mine.. I read almost half of the book to get an idea of what's going on, I read all the reviews too. I enjoyed reading it. And what amazed me most is Kotzwinkle's ability to register all this confusion in a person's mind. I thought it funny, interesting, new to me.. the confusion puzzled me

Apparently this book was a cult hit when it was published, but I only know one person my age who's ever heard of it (and it's his absolute favorite book of all time, which should tell you something). Horse Badorties is a crazy ex-hippie who got so high on organic seminola in the 60's that he just never came down. His first-person narration of his hapless, paranoid, chaotic, unsanitary life is a real trip that kept me in perpetual stitches. Warning: despite the rest of Kotzwinkle's track record (he's most famous for writing E.T.) this is not a kid's book. There's some sexual language and situations and a girl gets raped in it (to which Badorties is utterly indifferent).