Customer Reviews

Pike's Folly

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Fortyish multi-billionaire Rhode Islander Nathaniel Pike enjoys wasting money on Quixote projects that serve no purpose except some weird inner fulfillment. His current ploy involves buying wilderness land from the feds in order to simply pave over the natural landscape at the top of a mountain before constructing an inaccessible K-mart.

Meanwhile, protestors begin a media blitz to discredit Pike as a lunatic defying nature. While Pike ignores his adversaries, an Interior Department bureaucrat plans to keep Pike's cash while assisting the eccentric's opponents via using the FBI to investigate his activities to uncover dirt. At the same time that wealthy Greg Reese asks Pike to help him with his family's philanthropic foundation that hides ancestral guilt involving sexual abuse and mass-murder of slaves buried on Pike's former property. A collision is coming between several forces that will rendezvous on Pike's newly paved parking lot

This wild satire rips the American way of life as the corporations and government get away with waste, abuse and fraud that is more sophisticated perhaps than the appalling crimes to slaves (not just the enforced bondage). The story line contains a slice of America as a horde of red and blue descend upon Pike's peak. Though there is too much subplots to fully engage and definitely not for CEOs, Mike Heppner can expect his phone and email patriotically followed because he exposes the government-industrial complex as bush league towards the tax-paying masses.

Harriet Klausner

Pike's folly is a parking lot built on a tract of roadless wilderness in New Hampshire's White Mountains and one of this satirical novel's funniest passages is the media reaction to its completion. Dubbed "the Independence Project" (by the critics, not its billionaire builder), the strip of engineered blacktop receives raves from all sides.

"One approaches it with apprehension, but comes away feeling strangely renewed," says "The Boston Globe." The "Village Voice" compares him to Frank Lloyd Wright. And from the "L.A. Times:" "America has always had an uneasy relationship with dadaism, and Nathaniel Pike's Independence Project is no exception."

Pike is furious and aghast and vows to take it farther, to commit an outrage so meaningless, "it would have to be immune to interpretation, so that not even the most astute critic could say anything about it."

Most everyone in Heppner's second novel (after "The Egg Code") is concerned with public recognition on some level. And all, except Pike and his friend and nemesis Gregg Reese, another Rhode Island billionaire, are in their 20s or early 30s, "a time to experiment and make mistakes," as Heppner put it in a recent interview. And they are all doing plenty of that.

The novel is set in the small-town state of Rhode Island where everybody knows everybody. While Pike spends his money on meaningless projects - like buying an old farmhouse, tearing it down and rebuilding its exact replica on the same spot - Reese is the philanthropist. "Whatever stunt Nathaniel pulled, however wasteful or eccentric, Gregg countered it with a very public act of generosity. He thrived on the idea that, in the twenty-plus years that they'd known each other, he was undeniably, unambiguously, on the side of the right. Inside, however, another Gregg Reese, the one who sometimes found his own family history too much to bear, watched with envy as Pike spent millions on unworthy causes, getting away with things that would've sunk the Reeses."

In addition to guilt over the slave trade origins of the family fortune, Reese has personal worries. A gay man who lived a lie most of his life, he has recently gotten divorced and come out of the closet. He fears that his daughter, Allison, will reject him.

Allison, 22, is mostly revolted by the image of parental sexuality, period. She struggles to be fair to her father while rebelling in small ways - bringing her scruffy boyfriend Heath to Thanksgiving dinner, running up credit card bills. Heath, a budding filmmaker in an updated Andy Warhol mold, joins Pike in New Hampshire to film the parking lot project.

This leads to his first independent film - a nudey film with Pike's morose assistant, Stuart, and his insecure wife. Marlene, a "pear shaped" young woman with no self-confidence, is obsessed with public nudity. Stuart, who's written one novel and is blocked on a second, is getting bored with the nude thing, but goes along.

Heppner develops their stories around Pike, his project, and the groups whose fury Pike arouses, including humorless environmentalists and a questing government bureaucrat. Viewpoint skips from one to the other, with varying degrees of interest and amusement. Marlene's view is the most affecting and painful, Heath's the most banal and ambitious, Gregg's (ironically, given his age) the most hopeful and Pike's the funniest. Chilling scenes from the Reese's slave trading period add a malignant element.

The book has a lot going on and it occasionally threatens to be too much in too many directions, but Heppner brings it all together in Pike's outlandish parking lot. Funny, forgiving, savage, kind and merciless, Heppner's view encompasses the idea that we can escape more of our past than we deserve, given enough time.

A talented writer with a clear sense of the ridiculous and how seriously we take ourselves, Heppner is a writer who grows with each book. His next, he says, will be completely different and "more from the heart than the mind." His growing fan base will anticipate it eagerly.

--Portsmouth Herald

One of the worst books I've ever read all the way through to the end--and I only kept reading to see if it could really get worse (it can, and does).

Heppner uses lazy, predictable, wooden, pedestrian prose. Whoever at Publisher's Weekly said his prose is "axe-sharp" should be fired. This is a novel which requires no work whatsoever on the part of the reader (well, maybe only to stifle laughter at Heppner's terrible sentences and dialogue), uses no imagination, and would be utterly forgettable if it wasn't so unbelievably awful.

It's supposedly satire but it's not funny, it's supposedly literary but contains no artistry whatsoever. The Egg Code showed some promise, which is how I unfortunately got suckered into buying Pike's Folly. I won't be fooled again. This feels like something Heppner wrote in twenty minutes to fulfill a book contract. This is a work of fiction which is utterly without merit. Don't waste your time or money.

This is a book review for people who have short attention spans and like gut-level, first impressions:

Read this book! It's a pageturner and very rewarding.

Heppner's first, bloated novel, "The Egg Code," was critically well-received but, on its own, a knockoff of everything trite and tedious you might come across in a graduate-school writing program. Toss in a bit of Powers, a dash of Wallace, some Barthian hyperbole, some Pynchonian futurizing--blah, blah, blah--and you have "The Egg Code," one of the worst books ever written, despite the gargantuan advance and "postmodern" preening of its author.

Now, Heppner's back...and worse than before. If that's possible. "Pike's Folly" is a skeleton of a book: poorly written, blandly plotted. At least the book has one purpose: it's now supporting me left-leaning toilet. Thank you, Mr. Heppner, for writing such a "useful" book.