GORDON LIDDY IS MY MUSE: by Tommy ""Tip"" Paine

by John Calvin Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1990

A disappointingly thin collection, after the author's rich, imaginative American Falls (1985) and The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983). Batchelor explores the art of storytelling and the nature of the American hero in eight tall tales, narrated by a postmodern, just a tad too-hip Scheherazade, Tommy ""Tip"" Paine. Crossing American myths with the spy thriller's conventions produces uneven results in these jaunts from the USSR and Europe to intrigue in Hollywood, New York City (the last American wilderness), and the Heartland. The first two tales are wonderful: a poignant story of friendship between awkward Tip and a dashing Russian boy, each in love with cowboys. Later, Tip is briefly in the ""sci-fi/spy"" biz before he makes his living writing about it; Trifya does it for real as one of the KGB's ""Three Million Stooges."" In ""Hollywood Before the Mast,"" Batchelor audaciously equates the land of veneer with ""New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1850"" and peoples the story with marvellous characters like flamboyantly gay and percipient agent Yakkie and omnivorous love-object Kate O'Kates, with white-as-whalebone teeth, whom Tip takes for his Ahab. But Batchelor abuses the reader's good will with patronizing ""tips"" and word games; Ahab in Hollywood turns out to be bulimic; the eponymous Muse is a duped, rape victim of ""rat fucker"" E. Howard Hunt; and didactically we're told that ""Germany is Europe's blackness."" A mixed offering from Batchelor--instead of Scheherazade's bewitching tales, we mostly get a series of one-liners posing as epigrams.

Pub Date: March 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Linden/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION