Ride a Cockhorse (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Raymond Kennedy (Author), Katherine A. Powers (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: June 19, 2012 | Series: New York Review Books Classics

A revolution is under way at a once sleepy New England bank. Forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons has gone from sweet-tempered loan officer to insatiable force of nature almost overnight. Suddenly she’s brazenly seducing the high-school drum major, taking over her boss’s office, firing anyone who crosses her, inspiring populist fervor, and publicly announcing plans to crush her local rivals en route to dominating the entire banking industry in the northeast. The terrifying new order instituted by Frankie and her offbeat goon squad (led by her devoted hairdresser and including her own son-in-law) is an awesome spectacle to behold.
             Brimming with snappy dialogue and gleeful obscenity, Ride a Cockhorse is a rollicking cautionary tale of small-town demagoguery that might be seen to prefigure both America’s current financial woes and the rise of Sarah Palin. Frances is in any case a beautiful monster of an antiheroine—resist her at your peril!

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Ride a Cockhorse is at once high comedy and a mordant account of the paranoid personality, but this is only part of the elaborate business that Kennedy has undertaken; he has also brought off the improbable if not impossible—a novel about a bank! The best comic novel to come my way in a long time.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“Business booms for Mrs. Fitz, but then the hilarious manipulations of the press and her superiors give way to a Fascistic reign of terrors over her inferiors, and Mr. Kennedy has us pinned at precisely the point where the comic turns nasty.” —The New Yorker

“Perhaps the funniest American novel since John Kennedy Toole’s prize winner, A Confederacy of Dunces.” —Newsweek
 
“God knows, it must be hard to write a funny book about New England banking, but Kennedy has done it . . . Frankie Fitzgibbons is an inspired creation, a cross between Maggie Thatcher and Darth Vader.” —Boston Phoenix
 
“Kennedy is a master storyteller . . . The author’s vision has to do with a real wisdom of the heart.” —Raymond Carver
 
“A wonderful comic . . . a ribald, risible and riveting read.” —People Magazine
 
“Truly . . . one of this country’s finest writers.” —Boston Globe
 
“The kind of novelist who gets high praise in sophisticated places.” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times
 
“There are plenty of funny scenes in Ride a Cockhorse, a number of them good enough to make you laugh out loud.” —New York Newsday
 
“Ferociously comic . . . a believable blend of farce and tragedy. Raymond Kennedy is a novelist of such diabolical artistry that he may be the most original American writer since Flannery O’Connor . . .” —Joseph Coates, The Chicago Tribune
 
“If a sentence Raynond Kennedy wrote, then it is a sentence an artist made.” —Gordon Lish

"It's only the very rare work that can officially be deemed a classic a mere twenty-one years after its publication, but such a one is Raymond Kennedy's Ride a Cockhorse, newly republished New York Review Books' marvelous Classics series. I can't imagine how I missed Ride a Cockhorse the first time around, for it is one of the funniest novels I've ever picked up and also quite sui generis: Kennedy's voice is entirely idiosyncratic, his tale of a reign of terror at an unremarkable Connecticut valley bank a startling mixture of the ludicrous and the appalling." —Brooke Allen, Barnes and Noble Review

About the Author

Raymond Kennedy (1934–2008) was born and raised in western Massachusetts. In 1982, he joined the creative writing faculty at Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 2006.  Kennedy’s other novels include My Father’s Orchard; Goodnight, Jupiter; Columbine; The Flower of the Republic; Lulu Incognito; The Bitterest Age; and The Romance of Eleanor Gray.

Katherine A. Powers’s column on books and writers ran for many years in The Boston Globe and now appears in The Barnes & Noble Review under the title “A Reading Life.” She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life—The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963, forthcoming in 2013.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics; Reprint edition (June 19, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9781590174890
• ISBN-13: 978-1590174890
• ASIN: 1590174895
• Product Dimensions: 4.8 x 0.7 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #707,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Of the brazen, the impertinent and the majestically presumptuous July 24, 2012

By The Ginger Man VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is quite a ride as loan officer "Frankie" Fitzgibbons is transformed from bank loan officer to chief executive and mad emperor through sheer will power and charisma. Unfortunately, she has few of the skills and none of the morality needed in her leadership role. She reigns instead as a "managerial version of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts," says Katherine Powers in her Introduction. Ride a Cockhorse is a black comedy detailing the effects of irresponsible power and becomes "a grotesque expression of the spirit that seized America in the eighties." Frankie is a wonderful character, easy to hate and riveting to watch; the patron saint of "the brazen, the impertinent and the majestically presumptuous," in the words of Ms Powers.

Given her lack of traditional management skills, experience and academic training, Fitzgibbon relies on an instinctive sense of how to amass and consolidate influence. She uses the media to create her own image ("appealing to a vulgar streak in your readers") and fires employees indiscriminately to create instability and fear. Fitzgibbons is self-obssessed ("I haven't been spoiled enough in my life") and cynical ("The public wants to believe the worst about people anyhow"). She possesses a healthy disrespect for the educated, describing them as those who "went away to school to avoid being contaminated by the rest of us."

Like Mussolini, she summons people to her office and makes them cross a wide expanse of open carpet to reach her desk, a requirement she guesses will abash even the stoutest heart.

Raymond Kennedy is plainly both repulsed and fascinated by the character he has created and saves his most pointed criticism for the forces that enable the Fitzgibbon reign of terror. First is the bank president who reluctantly supports Frankie because she helps grow the business. Second is the media who created Frankie Fitzgibbon but which sees itself as a neutral bystander which records but does not make the news. Finally, Kennedy excoriates the public who is thrilled at the rise to prominence of one of its members.

In the end, the author seems to ask if others are more responsible for Frankie's excesses than she is herself. If our older generation of elites surrenders its responsibility, the media aims for sensation rather than truth and the public wants only to see itself in its leaders, who will emerge to show the way forward? Ride a Cockhorse suggests that Frankie Fitzgibbons and her ilk are one possible answer.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Equal parts fun, ridiculous, and sickening August 21, 2012

By Matthew Wilding

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Raymond Kennedy's "Ride a Cockhorse" was published in 1991 as a satire reflecting an era of banking gone mad and where selfishness was in vogue. It's re-release today was well-timed, as the same issues of the late 1980s have reared their ugly heads again. The similarities in eras make this book feel very modern.

The book is an enjoyable enough read. The story of the tyrannical psychopath Mrs. Fitzgibbons is, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. Sometimes though, she moves into cringe-worthy. Her sexual motivations are confusing and brutal, and the reactions to her behavior by people around her fluctuate between painfully accurate to entirely unbelievable.

Her tirades are entertaining, but a bit redundant.

This book is worth a read, but it's lightness is hard to balance with a handful of genuinely disturbing scenes sprinkled in.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Parody of American Corporate Management December 23, 2012

By WAL

Format:Paperback

This novel, published in 1991, anticipates the corporate management methods of today with uncanny accuracy. It gleefully parodies all the key aspects of the Jeff Skilling/Enron-Jack Welch/GE, rank-and-yank mode of corporate governance, including bullying subordinates, use of arbitrary downsizing (firings) to stimulate productivity through fear, surrounding themselves with sycophants, feckless and cowardly oversight by ownership, using public relations as a substitute for risk management and a thought-out business plan, and a cyclic "good cop - bad cop" approach to day-to-day management. It teaches that some form of charisma is a key aspect of the ability of these types of managers to function, which in the case of Mrs. Fitzgerald, the "Chief" of the book, is her sex appeal. Business acumen may very well have little or nothing to do with it.
As an example of the prescience of the writing, consider the following example (p. 157): "She swung back in her chair, gesturing languidly and tossing out clichés in a quietly boastful manner." Anyone who has endured corporate communications meetings by top management in the last ten to fifteen years, or has watched today's captains of industry on CNBC will be able to relate instantly to the situation brilliantly portrayed in the novel.