PETER DOYLE

by John Vernon ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1991

Or, ""The Adventures of Napoleon's Penis in the America of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Horace Greeley"": another of Vernon's wildly inventive improvements on the historical novel (La Salle, Lindbergh's Son). The missing member, cut off and stolen by a fraudulent English doctor on the Emperor's death, is sought 50 years later by Joseph Bonaparte Delafolie Benton, a wannabe scion of Napoleon's niece; by part-time necromancer Timothy Stokes, who wants it to complete his hideous dwarf Bonny, currently holding down the lead in Stokes's traveling Punch-and Judy show; and eventually by Count LÉon-Fernand-LÉon, deputized by the family powers to restore the vital organ to the outraged Emperor. It ends up instead with one Peter Doyle, an agreeable cipher whose main claim to fame is his loving friendship with Walt Whitman (whose fictitious but authoritative correspondence with Dickinson forms a delightful subplot). Amid the detritus of Horace Greeley's exemplary decline and fall, Peter's custody of the pizzle (whose value he never realizes) is saved twice when he and Jo Benton keep crossing paths going to and from the Union Pacific hamlet of Greeley, a Gilded Age Utopia run; and then is lost, by Ralph Meeker (whose daughter Josie seems destined for Peter), until a raid by the beleaguered Utes Oust as the three peter-hunters, joining forces, home in on Greeley) forces Peter to masquerade, with a little help from Napoleon, as a woman, and sets up the plot's last improbable twist. Sprawling, rambunctious, and more fun than any other historical since The Sot-Weed Factor.

Pub Date: May 1, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION