REVELATIONS OF GRIMM LOHR

Potter presents a fictional biography chronicling a family’s journey through the key events of the 20th century.

In his debut work of fiction, the author presents the story of Dr. Ernst Grimm Lohr (known to all simply as Grimm Lohr), a physician born in Turin, Italy, in 1889 (“in the age of genteel senility, nascent science, colonization and empire-making”), as told by his grandson, Elias Deane Grimm Lohr. Elias notes the ways in which his grandfather’s life touched on and sometimes epitomized “the leitmotifs of Western civilization—evangelical expansionism, a striving for the infinite, the spirit of economics encoded in the language of the bourgeoisie.” Grimm Lohr specializes in the human digestive system and its gases, which brings him to the attention of GeneralLudendorff and the German war machine during the First World War. He conducts experiments (including one in which 100 nuns are given a diet of uncultured buttermilk, uncooked reptiles, and raw cabbage), and after the war he becomes a successful author of books about his specialty, including The Gases of the Masses and Melodies of the Large Intestine. He fathers Elias’ dad, Irving, and Potter’s narrative follows this young man as he rebels (“I shall not arrange the affairs of my life around the bowel habits of other men, Father!”) and joins the Hitler Youth. The narrative moves on to focus on Elias’ own story, including his long sojourn in Hollywood working on such epic series as Heaven, Hell, Pus. Potter chronicles all of this with a remarkably dry, deadpan sense of humor that manages to remain understated while the author repeatedly makes flatulence-related jokes (poor, hapless Elias spends time late in the book at a getaway called Spirit Wind). The book’s very generous length betrays no trace of self-indulgence; the author layers every chapter with a delightful combination of historical and literary context (one character is described as “the kind of man Chaucer would have called a ‘stout carl’”) and Pynchonesque absurdities.

A strange and winning historical romp about a family plagued by doubts and gas.