A NATIONAL LITERARY TREASURE WHO GETS LITTLE NOTICE THESE DAYS

See if you can guess which American fiction writer I’m thinking of:

He is a longtime resident of the state of Maine.

His first few novels were published in the 1970s.

He has since turned out dozens of books in a variety of genres.

He has been married for more than fifty years, and his wife is also a novelist.

He has hit the top of the bestseller list and has won a World Fantasy Award.

All of those things are true of Stephen King, America’s most famous living writer, but they are also true of William Kotzwinkle, one of America’s best-kept literary secrets. His first novel, Hermes 3000, was published in 1972, but it was his second novel, the underground classic novel The Fan Man, which cemented his status as a writer to watch. King’s first two books, Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, were published in 1974 and 1975, respectively. But it was his third book, 1977’s The Shining, that first landed him on the New York Times’ Weekly Best Seller List and cemented his status as a pop-fiction wunderkind. The first time King ever landed a title atop Publishers Weekly’s year-end list of the bestselling novels in America was in 1984, when his novel The Talisman outsold every other work of fiction published that year. The first time Kotzwinkle ever landed a title atop Publishers Weekly’s year-end list of the bestselling novels in America was in 1982, when his novelization, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, outsold every other work of fiction. Both writers got a bit of help with these mega-bestsellers. The Talisman was written in collaboration with Peter Straub, a friend of King’s and another bestselling horror novelist. E.T. was a novelization of a Melissa Mathison’s screenplay for the 1982 Steven Spielberg film of the same name. King would return to the top of the bestseller list again and again. Kotzwinkle never would.

At this point, I should probably back up and give you a detailed outline of the author’s life story, which would be much easier to do if I were writing about King. Alas, it’s not so easy to glean details of Kotzwinkle’s private life. He isn’t exactly a recluse. He gives interviews now and then, such as this one in support of his 1996 comic novel The Bear Went Over the Mountain:

http://www.beatrice.com/interviews/kotzwinkle/

But he almost never writes about himself. Wikipedia lists the titles of 51 books written by Kotzwinkle, none of which are nonfiction. Wikipedia currently lists Kotzwinkle’s birthday as November 22, 1943. The search engine JRank and the website encyclopedia.com both list his birth year as 1938, which I believe is correct.

https://biography.jrank.org/pages/4520/Kotzwinkle-William.html

All the sources I checked agreed that Kotzwinkle was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father, William John Kotzwinkle, was a printer. His mother, born Madolyn Murphy, was a housewife. President Joe Biden was born in Scranton almost exactly four years after Kotzwinkle, on November 20, 1942, and both men were raised in the Catholic faith, so I suppose its possible that, as children, the two men bumped into each other at some Catholic sporting event or religious gathering, but I can find no evidence of it. For decades Scranton has been synonymous with economic decline, so it seems unlikely that Kotzwinkle grew up in affluence (Biden didn’t). In fact, Scranton’s reputation as the prototypical American working-class town is one reason why the American version of The Office was set there. And Kotzwinkle credits Scranton with helping him develop a sense of humor that deflates big egos and makes fun of pretentiousness, just as The Office did. In November of 2021, to promote his crime novel Felonious Monk, Kotzwinkle did an interview with Stephen Nester, who hosts a show called Poets of the Tabloid Murder, for WBCR in Great Barrington, MA.

https://beta.prx.org/stories/392321

The author told Nester, “The guys in my home town – putting the needle into you was their favorite sport. Always reminding you…you’re just another guy, and that’s that. They perfected this form of verbal abuse that was always funny, always unexpected, but it was great. I grew up with it.”

Encyclopedia.com notes that Kotzwinkle, an only child, attended Rider College (now Rider University, located in New Jersey) and Pennsylvania State University, where he studied drama and playwrighting. He dropped out of Penn State in 1957 and moved to New York to pursue a more bohemian lifestyle. He took on various odd jobs, including work as a department store Santa Claus during the Christmas season. In the early 1960s, he worked as a short order cook and an editor/writer at a tabloid newspaper. His hobby was playing folk music on the guitar. The 1996 interview referred to above notes that, “When William Kotzwinkle was studying to be an actor, he realized that the lines that he was coming up with in his improv classes were good -- really good. Better than his acting, in fact. So he shifted to writing, first plays and then fiction.” His first published work was a children’s picture book called The Firemen, which was illustrated by Joe Servello, an old school friend who would go on to collaborate with Kotzwinkle on many other projects. Published in 1969, The Firemen contains only 302 words of text and embraces a minimalism reminiscent of the poetry of William Carlos Williams. The book’s final lines

The alleyway was long,

and they rolled down it in the sunshine,

he and Nippy and Mister Bear,

inside the red fire engine.

are reminiscent of Williams’s famous poem The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Both the story and the poem contain a couple of animals, a small red unmotorized vehicle, and a brief weather report.

Kotzwinkle’s website

https://www.kotzwinkle.com/about

provides virtually no biographical information. It does, however, contain a link to a blog that contains exactly one entry. In that entry, Kotzwinkle writes, “At age 18, I tried to become a monk. The abbot listened to me for five minutes, told me I had no vocation and pointed toward the door. By this time he’s probably gone to heaven and I’m lucky I didn’t go to jail because shortly thereafter I stole a milk truck in Manhattan. I didn’t need the milk, only a ride back to my apartment, an act not inspired by the Holy Spirit but by the kind of guys I hung out with, several of whom did go to jail.”

Kotzwinkle has been married to the novelist Elizabeth Gundy since 1965 (they have collaborated on a series of children’s books about Walter the Farting Dog). If possible, Ms. Gundy seems to be even more publicity-shy than her husband. She has written five novels, one of which, Bliss, published in 1977, was turned into a 1980 TV movie called The Seduction of Miss Leona, which starred Lynn Redgrave. Other than that, I can tell you little about her.

It isn’t difficult to find signed copies of William Kotzwinkle’s books, so I have to assume that he does publicity junkets and book signings. For years, my wife and I traveled all over northern California to attend readings and signings by favorite writers of ours (John Irving, E.L. Doctorow, Dick Francis, Gore Vidal, etc.) and we kept a close eye on the back pages of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Book Review section, where upcoming literary events were advertised. I was always on the lookout for a Kotzwinkle appearance somewhere in the Bay Area but, if he made one, I must have missed it. He seems to confine his publicity appearances to East Coast venues. (This has not prevented me from acquiring a dozen or more of his signed books – and even some personal letters written by him – at book fairs and on the internet over the years. In August of this year I bought a signed first edition of his 1989 novel The Midnight Examiner for $12. Signed first editions of most Kotzwinkle novels can be found online for well under $100. I recently bought the only signed copy of The Fan Man I could find anywhere online and paid less than fifty dollars for it – okay, $49.99, but still. I’ve been a fan of King’s since the 1970s but I’ve never owned a signed copy of any of his books. Just now I searched the internet for a book signed by King, and couldn’t find anything for less than $450, which is way outside my pay grade.)

Like Biden, Kotzwinkle was born into the so-called Silent Generation, which may be why he keeps silent on personal matters. As far as literature goes, this places him between two major American movements. He was born too late to be a true member of the so-called Beat Generation, whose biggest names – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, etc. – were mostly born in the 1920s. And he arrived too early to be an official member of the Baby Boom generation, whose biggest literary stars – the Pulitzer Prize-winners Geoffrey Eugenides, Michael Chabon, Richard Russo, Michael Cunningham, Robert Olen Butler, Jane Smiley, Oscar Hijuelos, Elizabeth Strout, etc. – mostly came out of various MFA programs at elite universities. Kotzwinkle was among a group of writers – including Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ed McClanahan, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane, etc. – who were born in the 1930s and didn’t fit comfortably into either of the two monolithic groups that bracketed them. Kesey’s Wikipedia entry notes that, “He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.” This also seems to be the case of many others in Kesey’s cohort. Kotzwinkle would have been just shy of his thirtieth birthday during 1968’s famous “Summer of Love,” making him too old for hippiedom and too young for Beatdom. But his work includes elements of both Beat literature and some of the more playful work of Boomer writers such as David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem. Chabon’s 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, was inspired in part by the lives and careers of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish pals who created the Superman comic books. Lethem’s 2003 novel, The Fortress of Solitude, gestures at Superman as well. In 1983, Warner Books published Superman III, Kotzwinkle’s novelization of the Richard Lester film of the same name. Chabon’s book won a Pulitzer Prize. Lethem’s was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. Kotzwinkle’s was a paperback original and was swiftly forgotten. But this is part of Kotzwinkle’s charm. Writers like Chabon and Lethem take pop culture so seriously that they often post-modernize all the fun out of it. Kotzwinkle is willing to embrace pop culture for what it is, without having to prove to anybody that he’s better than those who enjoy, say, Superman stories unironically. To misquote Michelle Obama, “When they go high, Kotzwinkle goes low.”

As for the Beats, you pretty much had to live a life of dissolution and vagabondage, or at least pretend to, in order to be taken seriously as a writer of Beat literature. This explains why Jack Kerouac and his pal Neal Cassady both died in their forties. Others, like William S. Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, lived long lives (the latter made it to 101) but produced almost nothing of importance after exiting their forties. Still others, like Ginsburg and Gary Snyder (still writing at 94) joined the establishment by accepting professorships at prestigious universities. They took on a respectable elder-statesman status that was largely at odds with the earlier, more anarchic work with which they established their reputations. But, in truth, the Beat Generation had always been largely a product of academia, with Columbia University being one of its major points of origin. And any artistic movement born in academia always ends up taking itself too seriously. Many of them start out that way too.

Kotzwinkle’s work contains many Beat elements, including references to jazz music, drugs, surrealism, and outsider culture. His first novel, Hermes 3000, is named after the model of typewriter that Kerouac wrote his final novel on. That first Kotzwinkle novel seems to have been at least a partial attempt at Beat writing. It’s less a novel than a rogue’s gallery of characters in search of a plot. It bears some resemblance to the “anti-plays” of absurdist writer Eugene Ionescu, who also wrote on a Hermes 3000. But Kotzwinkle doesn’t embrace either esthetic – Beat or Theater of the Absurd – with the seriousness of a true believer. It feels more like a literary exercise than a novel. But back in the late 60s and early 70s, even mainstream publishers were willing to take a chance on young weirdos with a literary bent in the hopes of discovering the next Vonnegut or Brautigan. And with his very next novel, Kotzwinkle appeared to have transformed himself into the Brautigut every publisher was looking for.

The Fan Man, published in 1974, is the first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative of Horse Badorties, a drug-addled hippie who wanders New York City by day, mostly talking to himself, ogling fifteen-year-old girls, and collecting a lot of useless junk to haul back to the various apartments in which he illegally squats at night. In a rapturous review written for The New Republic, William Kennedy (who ten years later would win a Pulitzer Prize for Ironweed, a novel that also focuses on a substance-abusing drifter from the state of New York), called The Fan Man “the funniest book of 1974.” Kennedy described Badorties as “an avatar for our time, a filthy, hippie dope fiend and dealer who lives in what he calls an ever-shifting shit pile, who plays the moon lute and chases fifteen-year-old chicks, man.” (Badorties works the word “man” into almost every sentence, often more than once.) Kennedy continues, “Horse Badorties is obviously an unusual person. So also must be William Kotzwinkle, who has invented Horse in this short, artfully structured, supremely insane novel about a freaky, quasi-Hindu-shmindu Brahman who is one with the ridiculously filthy, worn-out world.”

The Fan Man didn’t become a bestseller, but it became something even better if what you aspire to be is a writer’s writer: a cult classic. I first heard about it in 1981, when a tout at a local racetrack mentioned it to me. This tout often gave my wife and me valuable betting tips on the harness-horse races. One day we got to talking about books and he highly recommended The Fan Man. I sought out a copy and read it. After that, whenever I bumped into him at the track, the tout and I would exchange lines from The Fan Man. He’d say something like, “How’s your apartment, man?” And I’d say, “The rent’s kinda high, man, but its not so bad if you don’t pay it.” Back then, no one who loved The Fan Man ever talked about anything but how funny it was. William Kennedy’s review focused almost exclusively on the book’s humor. But, after re-reading it recently, I was struck by how sad it is, too. In the 1970s and 80s I knew plenty of burnt-out stoners, guys in their thirties who tended to always be between jobs, crashing in some friend’s basement, or sleeping on a sofa in a sibling’s small apartment. They talked a lot like Horse Badorties and I found them mostly comical. But many of these men (they were all men) had fought in the Vietnam War and had come home hopelessly addicted to some substance or another. They were still fairly young and so I assumed someday they’d get their shit together and become normal members of society. Only later did I realize that wasn’t going to happen for most of them. The one I liked most committed suicide sometime around 1990. Horse Badorties epitomized these lost baby boomers. Only during my recent re-read did I realize that his tendency to hoard junk wasn’t just comical but also a sign of serious mental illness. In my youth, I considered it cool that he bounced around from one squat hole to another. Now I realize that Horse Badorties was truly homeless. He must have had some sort of a government pension, because he always had a bit of spending money. But he spent it compulsively, mostly on crap he didn’t need and couldn’t use: a broken air-raid siren, a minesweeper, the braking mechanism from an old subway car. He seems also to be a pedophile (technically, he is an ephebophile) but he’s never able to actually act on this perversion, even when he manages to lure a willing fifteen-year-old into one of his shitty squat holes. Only towards the end of the novel does Kotzwinkle give us some clues about what made Horse Badorties the broken man that he is. At one point, he frightens a group of teenagers by putting on what he calls his Uncle Skulky face. “I am their insane Uncle Skulky, man, skulking through the attic, along the hallway of their minds. This is a hideous face, man, and perhaps it is the most hideous of all my faces, man, because it is not something long-buried like my tyrannosaurus-rex, but something which lived in my family tree not very long ago, man. Dear old Uncle Skulky, man, is the impossibly mad relative we all have sleeping in our souls.”

This suggests that Badorties was abused in some way by an older relative when he was a child. A few pages later, Badorties is blissing out in Van Cortlandt Park, his favorite New York hangout, when he sees, “the most incredible sight, man, of my life. Puerto Rican kids, man, in green uniforms and black berets, man, coming through the trees and bushes of Van Cortlandt Park, man, carrying toy guns and hand grenades, man…Puerto Rican kids, man, armed, in platoon formation, training in the woods. For what, man, are they training? Through the bushes, man, about fifty of them. And here comes their leader, man, a snappy-looking sonofabitch, man, with G.I. outfit, white spats, spiffy uniform.”

This leader shouts out, “To the right flank, HO!” And Badorties thinks this is a reference to Ho Chi Minh. He is probably seeing nothing more than a troop of Boy Scouts training in the park. But it appears to have triggered a flashback from his days in Vietnam (something never mentioned in the book, but it may account for his fondness for air-raid sirens, minesweepers, and other military paraphernalia). Thus it seems clear that he also suffers from PTSD (which could explain the disability pension he seems to live on). Throughout the book Badorties is critical of Puerto Ricans (though largely chill towards all other ethnicities). In his review of the novel, Kennedy says that Badorties “is racist on Puerto Ricans who he fears are taking over the world…” That’s how I saw it, too, the first time I read the book. But now it seems that he loathes Puerto Ricans only because he has conflated them in his mind with the Vietnamese he fought during his military service.

I may be reading more into Kotzwinkle’s novel than it contains. But it seems to me that, while early fans of the book, like myself and Kennedy and the tout, found it primarily just a comic novel, Kotzwinkle always meant it to be a sympathetic portrait of a mentally-scarred survivor of the 1960s and all of its worst legacies: the break up of the traditional family, widespread drug abuse, the Vietnam war, capitalism run amok and turning large swaths of the population into compulsive consumers with no money left over for rent or health care.

Kennedy ended his review like this: “Wearing one Japanese, one Chinese shoe, uncoding the Tibetan Book of the Dead and dealing Acapulco produce via Colorado, Horse walks into American literature a full-blown achievement, a heroic godheaded head [“head” was slang for drug addict back in the day], a splendid creep, a sublime prince of the holy trash pile. Send congratulations to William Kotzwinkle, also a hero, man.” Like the rest of us, Kennedy saw Badorties as a sort of holy fool. Looking back from a distance of nearly fifty years, however, it seems that he was always meant to be a tragic cautionary tale, a foretaste of the pathologies that would afflict society if we didn’t soon attempt a course correction: a massive increase in mental illness, homelessness, financial inequity, torn safety nets, unchecked militarism, drug abuse, anomie, and a populace unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

After the critical success of The Fan Man, Kotzwinkle could have made a comfortable living as a sort of east coast version of Richard Brautigan. Over the course of about twenty-five years (1957-82) Brautigan turned out ten poetry collections and nine slender novels (several other books were published posthumously) mostly about freaks and social outsiders living in Oregon and California. But Kotzwinkle has never been one to settle into a comfortable groove. In 1975 he published a novella in Redbook magazine that became such a sensation that, before the end of the year, it had been published as a standalone book. It would later win an O. Henry Award as one of the best stories of 1975. Swimmer in the Secret Sea tells the story of Johnny and Diane Laski, a couple of bohemians who live in a rural woodland. The story begins as Diane, nine months pregnant, feels her water breaking. Johnny puts her into the couple’s battered pickup truck and rushes her to the hospital. Alas, through no one’s fault, the child dies during the birthing process. Johnny and Diane must return home to their cabin and deal with their immense sense of loss. Johnny builds a wooden coffin for the baby and, with the help of hermit who lives nearby, buries it near a stream. That’s pretty much all the plot the story contains. But Kotzwinkle’s sharp insights into how a tragedy like this can bring the world crumbling down for the people involved give the story the heft of a major work of fiction. Many of us react to news of someone else’s stillborn child with a wistful reflection that, bad as it is, it isn’t nearly as bad a losing a child at age three, or ten, or fifteen. Kotzwinkle’s little book shows just how misguided that thinking is. And, because of the similarities between author and protagonist – both are married, childless artists who live in relative isolation in a rural setting – it’s easy to assume that the story might be at least partially autobiographical. In Ian McEwan’s 2012 spy novel Sweet Tooth, the narrator, Serena Frome, and her associate Thomas Haley are both fans of twentieth-century fiction but can agree on the excellence of only a single book:

"... he couldn't interest me in the novels of John Hawkes, Barry Hannah or William Gaddis, and he failed with my heroines, Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and Jennifer Johnston. I thought his lot were too dry, he thought mine were wet, though he was prepared to give Elizabeth Bowen the benefit of the doubt. During that time, we managed to agree on only one short novel, which he had in a bound proof, William Kotzwinkle's Swimmer in the Secret Sea. He thought it was beautifully formed, I thought it was wise and sad."

Because it was published originally in the pages of a women’s magazine and then as a paperback original, the book failed to attract much notice from serious critics. It is said to have sold over 100,000 copies in paperback, but exact records of paperback sales of the era are hard to find. Chronicle Books republished it in hardback in 1994, and David R. Godine republished it as a trade paperback in 2010. Like so much of Kotzwinkle’s work, it qualifies as a cult classic. It hasn’t generated a ton of reviews at Amazon.com, but those readers who have written about it tend to be passionate about it.

“A perfect novella in every way—there is not a single superfluous word.”

“I'm at a loss for words. I'll never forget this book.”

“I read the short story in Redbook as a young mother in 1975 or thereabouts and never forgot it.”

Over the next four years, Kotzwinkle turned out one winner after another, no two of them alike. Dr. Rat (1976) is a fantasy novel in which Kotzwinkle channels the thoughts of rats and dogs and other creatures being cruelly experimented on in a medical research facility. Ostensibly a denunciation of animal cruelty, the book can also be read as an allegory of the Holocaust – or simply an exploration of man’s inhumanity to himself and others. Oddly, it is often very funny. It won a World Fantasy Award.

Fata Morgana, published in 1977, is a crime novel set in the Paris of the 1860s, and combines elements of the Sherlock Holmes canon, magical realism, and the Victorian sensation novel. The following year he published Herr Nightingale and the Satin Woman, a graphic novel (illustrated by Servello) about a detective’s search for a German officer shortly after the end of World War II. As one Amazon customer noted, “This book is amazing - a pulpy, mystical noir graphic novel from 1978, when graphic novels weren't a thing.” Two years later, in 1980, Kotzwinkle returned with Jack in the Box, a collection of vignettes, many of them very raunchy, about an American boy growing up in the 1940s. The book begins with a quote from Mark Twain: “Persons attempting to find a plot will be shot.” Jack in the Box appears to be less a novel than a comically exaggerated version of Kotzwinkle’s own boyhood, somewhat in the same vein as James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times, but with lots of smut. In 1990, New Line Cinema brought out a film version of the story, re-titled Book of Love, with a screenplay by Kotzwinkle. The PG-13 theatrical release was fairly tame, but the R-rated director’s cut, which was released on DVD in 2004, comes closer to capturing the spirit of the “novel.”

The year 1982 would prove to be the high-water mark of Kotzwinkle’s career, at least in terms of commercial success. When President Ronald Reagan took office in January of 1981, the thrift and scarcity that had marked the Carter Era came to an end and a celebration of all things material and capitalistic had just begun. The first great American novel to capture this spirit was Kotzwinkle’s Christmas at Fontaine’s, published in 1982 and illustrated by Joe Servillo. The story unspools over the course of three days leading up to Christmas. The action takes place almost entirely in a grand old emporium in midtown Manhattan, a department store that seems to be a combination of Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Bonwit Teller. The book is less a novel than a collage, a collection of vignettes focusing on how various people connected to the store pass their time as Christmas approaches. Officer Locke, the store’s chief of security, is a sadist who loves to grab underprivileged children loitering in the store and toss them out into the street bodily. Locke has become convinced that some homeless child is sleeping in the store overnight, and he is obsessed with the idea of finding the child and punishing him. Winifred Ingram works in the store’s Kitchen Department demonstrating coffee machines, a job that forces her to drink twenty-five cups of coffee a day, thus robbing her of sleep at night. She is recently divorced and foolishly gave her husband permission to take custody of their children for the entirety of the Christmas season. She is broke and lonely and miserable. Herbert Muhlstock is a middle-aged man who manages the Toy Department, the shop’s busiest department during Christmas season. He is divorced and has permanently lost custody of his children. Thus it is torment for him to work in a department thronged by children and their parents. He loves numbers and longs to transfer into the Accounting Department. Mad Aggie is a homeless woman who lives outside the store, sleeps in alleyways and eats out of dumpsters. Although she doesn’t enter the store often, she interacts on occasion with customers and employees going in and out of it. Early in his tenure as president, Ronald Reagan, with the bipartisan support of the Congress, famously “deinstitutionalized” most of the country’s mentally ill.

https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/

In January of 1982, a few weeks after Christmas, an elderly and mentally ill New York City woman named Rebecca Smith was found frozen to death in a makeshift cardboard hovel on 10^th Avenue and 17^th Street. The New York Times and other media outlets heavily covered the story.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/31/nyregion/one-of-city-s-homeless-goes-home-in-death.html

At that time, homeless people dying of exposure was still fairly rare. Nowadays, it happens so often that it draws little media attention. Christmas at Fontaine’s was published ten months after Smith’s death, and Mad Aggie, a deinstitutionalized homeless woman appears to have been modeled after Rebecca Smith. Both Aggie and Rebecca have a husband and child they no longer see. Both women were given electric shock therapy while institutionalized for mental illness. It’s possible Kotzwinkle’s novel was completed before Rebecca Smith’s death. In which case, he would appear to have been one of the few cultural commentators who was able to foresee what the Reagan Era’s deinstitutionalizing of the mentally ill would bring.

Presiding over this assemblage of characters is Louis Fontaine, the millionaire owner of the store and a man who bears a resemblance to another, even more wealthy New York City businessman who became famous for firing his apprentices:

Louis Fontaine closed his office door and walked down the executive corridor. He stopped before the Accounting Office and looked in. “You’re a bunch of dummies,” he said to the wraiths of his staff. “You don’t know how to handle the IRS. You don’t know how to push…You’re fired.”

Christmas at Fontaine’s contains barely an ounce of sentimentality or goodwill in it. Kotzwinkle probably used up all the sentimentality he could muster in his novelization of the Steven Spielberg film ET: The Extra-terrestrial, which was published in the same year. Naturally, that sentimental novelization became far and away the year’s bestselling work of fiction, while the depressing social critique of Christmas at Fontaine’s barely made a stir at the checkout counter (E.T., it should be noted, works fairly well as a parable of Christ’s arrival on earth, his persecution, and eventual return to the heavens). Christmas at Fontaine’s is a coruscating look at American capitalism at its most ruthless. When, towards the end of the novel, Officer Locke finally captures the homeless child who has been hiding out in the store for weeks on end, he locks the unfortunate lad in a metal pet enclosure barely big enough for a cat. But before Locke can physically abuse the boy any further, Louis Fontaine comes along and demands that Locke uncage the boy. At this point I thought that Kotzwinkle was finally going to give us a bit of Christmas cheer. But that doesn’t happen. Fontaine is obsessed with dodging taxes. He wants the store to adopt the boy as a mascot and put him on display in a prominent location as a sort of live-action manikin for lovers of poverty porn. Then he’ll invite the press in to write about how generous and charitable the store is. Fontaine plans to wildly exaggerate the costs of maintaining the boy, and use those exaggerated expenses to reduce his tax obligation. By devoting the final act of his story to an effort at reducing taxes on the rich, Kotzwinkle wrote the quintessential Christmas story for the era of Reaganomics.

Long before anti-Christmas films like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), The Ref (1994), Reindeer Games (2000), and Bad Santa (2003) became a thing, Kotzwinkle produced probably the most anti-Christmas tale of all time.

Christmas at Fontaine’s was published on November 15, 1982, just six months after the publication of Kotzwinkle’s novelization of E.T., which was released as a paperback original in June of that year. But E.T. became such a huge bestseller (by August it had been through nineteen reprints), that the cover of Fontaine’s carried the notice that this was “His first novel since E.T.” Kotzwinkle’s adaptation of E.T. became the first novelization ever to make it to the top of Publishers Weekly’s list of the ten bestselling novels of the year. A lot of novelizations are written by cash-strapped novelists in need of an easy paycheck. That wasn’t the case with E.T. Kotzwinkle hadn’t gone to Hollywood looking for work. Hollywood came to him. Spielberg had been a fan of Kotzwinkle’s ever since he happened upon The Fan Man back in the mid 1970s. He knew that E.T. was going to be a special film, and he wanted the novelization to be special as well.

Kotzwinkle was brought into the project early and provided with a first draft of Melissa Mathison’s script. As a result, his novel differs in many significant ways from the film. The film is told mainly through the eyes of Elliot Taylor (Henry Thomas), the ten-year-old boy who firsts befriends E.T. The novel, though written in third person, is told almost entirely from E.T.’s point of view. This dramatically alters the way the reader experiences the events of the story. What’s more, the novel is a bit less sentimental and contains more adult humor than the film. Elliot’s mother, Mary Taylor (played by Dee Wallace in the film), is single in both versions of the story, but in Kotzwinkle’s novel she is also rather horny, frequently longing for the sex life that she has been denied ever since her husband left her. Her negative feelings about motherhood abound in the book:

If anyone knew in advance what it was to raise kids, they’d never do it.

How nice it must have been when children went to work in coal mines at the age of nine. But those days, she felt, were gone forever.

In both the film and novel, E.T. is a botanist from a faraway planet. In the film, E.T. possesses the power to resuscitate dead houseplants. In the book, he can also communicate with plants. Kotzwinkle’s book is full of short, humorous, asides made by vegetables:

They are only children, said a nearby cucumber.

There’s nothing to fear, said a tomato plant. It’s only the Pizza Wagon.

That’s Elliot, said the green beans. He lives here.

Don’t stab yourself in the foot, said a little potted ivy.

Kotzwinkle’s entire oeuvre is filled with the thoughts and words of animals, and E.T. is no exception. At several points he gives us the observations of Harvey, the Taylor family’s pet dog. A case in point:

Food had not been forthcoming all day. Everyone had forgotten the main business around here, of feeding dogs. What was going on? Was it because of the monster upstairs? I will have to eat him, thought Harvey, quietly.

In Kotzwinkle’s book, Elliot has a frenemy named Lance. When Lance sees Elliot trick-or-treating with E.T. on Halloween night, he isn’t fooled by Elliot’s claim that E.T. is a young cousin of his in a space-alien costume. Lance is a sci-fi nerd and knows a real alien when he sees one. He threatens to report E.T.’s whereabouts to the government agents who are looking for the alien unless Elliot allows him access to E.T. At that point Lance becomes a major player in the story. Lance appeared in Mathison’s original draft of the script, but was eliminated in a later draft written by Matthew Robbins, who had collaborated with Spielberg on several previous projects (he co-wrote the script for The Sugarland Express and did uncredited rewrites on other Spielberg films). Judging from Kotzwinkle’s novel, Mathison’s script was more fun and playful than the eventual shooting script. But it also contained more speaking parts and more special effects, which may explain why it got whittled down. Both Kotzwinkle’s book and Spielberg’s film contain a scene in which E.T. gets drunk on beer he has found in the Taylor family’s fridge. Meanwhile, at school, Elliot, who has unknowingly formed some sort of mind-meld with E.T., also becomes drunk. In the film, this causes him to hiccup and slur his words while sitting in the office of the school’s principal. In the book, getting drunk causes E.T. to lose his hold on gravity and begin floating around the Taylor’s kitchen. As a result, Elliot, a mile away at school, begins floating around the principal’s office, which nearly causes the principal to suffer a nervous breakdown.

One of the most curious changes from book to film is in the brand of candy Elliot uses to lure E.T. into his house. Throughout the book Elliot feeds E.T. M&Ms, which were referenced in early drafts of the script. But when Universal Pictures sought permission from Mars Incorporated to use M&Ms in the film, Mars demurred, fearing that associating their brand with a frightening space alien (they obviously hadn’t seen any film footage) would turn children against it. Thus, Universal turned to the Hershey Company and asked permission to use Reese’s Pieces in the film. Similar in appearance to M&Ms, Reese’s Pieces had just been introduced in the U.S. a couple of years before the film’s release and weren’t yet very popular. After the film came out, sales of Reese’s Pieces soared by about 300 percent. The book contains many amusing references to M&Ms – far more than the film contains to Reese’s Pieces. At one point, Kotzwinkle tells us about E.T.: “Now he understood the meaning of Earth life: ten billion years of evolution to produce – the M&M. What more could one ask of a planet?” In fact, the book contains references to other Mars Incorporated candies as well. After trick-or-treating on Halloween night, E.T. comes home and dumps out his haul on the floor. Kotzwinkle writes, “There were piles of M&Ms, and one especially powerful bar called a Milky Way, apparently for the longer voyages.” Although Kotzwinkle’s bestselling novel is full of references to M&Ms, it doesn’t seem to have had any positive influence on the sales of that candy, which is an indication of just how much more cultural influence films have than books.

Though they share the same DNA, Kotzwinkle’s book has a much different agenda than Spielberg’s film. The book is far less sentimental than the film. It is goofy, filled with risqué jokes about sex and drugs, and not much interested in jerking tears. From one page to the next, it can veer from the slapstick comedy of a Marx Brothers film to the stoner humor of a Cheech and Chong film. Spielberg liked it so much that he sketched out an idea for a sequel and then asked Kotzwinkle to expand it into another novel. Published in 1985, E.T. – The Book of the Green Planet proved to be a successful follow-up to the original although, lacking a blockbuster film to tie into, its sales figures were not as impressive as the original’s.

Although he would never again recapture the cultural prominence he had in 1982, Kotzwinkle has continued to produce a wide array of literary work in the forty years since, from children’s picture books to short story collections to novel-length poems and more. Aside from E.T., probably his most popular novel is The Bear Went Over the Mountain, a gentle spoof of the publishing industry that came out in 1996. It tells the story of Hal Jam, a bear who comes across an unpublished novel that has been abandoned by its disillusioned author and decides to take it to New York City and publish it as his own work. It was nominated for a World Fantasy Award (Kotzwinkle’s novel; not the Hal’s).

Although I began this essay by comparing Kotzwinkle to his fellow Maine resident Stephen King (who has favorably blurbed some of Kotzwinkle’s work), I believe a comparison with John Irving might be more relevant. Both men are members of the so-called Silent Generation (Irving turned eighty-three earlier this mothn). Each man made his literary debut in the late 1960s. Irving’s annus mirabilus came just a few years before Kotzwinkle’s, with the publication of The World According to Garp in 1978. Here’s how a recent Wall Street Journal story describes that event.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiction-review-john-irvings-the-last-chairlift-11666360909

Garpomania was what they called the remarkable international reaction to John Irving’s 1978 novel The World According to Garp. Maybe you remember it? Mr. Irving had been the author of three respectfully but little noticed novels before this more ambitious effort. Garp was praised and sold well at once, but the real popular groundswell began when the book arrived in cheap mass-market editions and word of mouth was accelerated by a now-famous promotional campaign that included bumper stickers and golf caps emblazoned with the slogan “I believe in Garp.” Mr. Irving, young and photogenic, posed in Playboy in a wrestler’s singlet. His novel won the 1980 National Book Award in the short-lived “paperback” category and went on to sell in the millions. Once, maybe twice in a decade the mousy little genre of literary fiction is allowed a massive cultural moment that permeates society and makes an author a recognizable celebrity. In the early 1980s, John Irving was the man.

Irving deserved his moment in the sun. Garp was an impressive hybrid of popular novel and serious literature. The immense glare of the spotlight might have frightened off a less self-confident writer, but Irving was made of sterner stuff. Over the next twenty years he produced a string of big fat novels – The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Son of the Circus, and A Widow for One Year – that all proved to be not only popular but also well-written and cleverly plotted. They all suffered a bit from the bloat that infected Garp but not seriously. And at least two or three of those books (Cider House, Widow, perhaps Meany) are clearly better novels than Garp. Alas, after 1998, the quality of Irving’s books began to fall off dramatically. Here’s how the abovementioned Wall Street Journal story describes Irving’s most recent novel, his fifteenth:

Its diffuse, somewhat distracted, sense of déjà vu gives “The Last Chairlift” the feel of an unearthed time capsule, which contains many things from the past but lacks the organizational motive that brought it all together in the first place. Whether Mr. Irving, now 80, has fallen victim to the laws of diminishing returns or is simply indulging in a kind of protracted career retrospective is hard to know, but Irving addicts who endure to the end will leave the book thinking fondly, again, of “Garp.”

The reviewer also notes that “as is characteristic of late works of fiction, the plot here has been thinned down to its barest elements and replaced by what could politely be called woolgathering.”

In the twenty-first century William Kotzwinkle’s output has consisted primarily of children’s books, specifically those about Walter the Farting Dog. He has produced only three novels this century, The Amphora Project, in 2005, Felonious Monk, in 2021, and Bloody Martini in 2023. The Amphora Project, though it has its moments, is one of his weakest novels, a patchwork of timeworn sci-fi tropes that toggles back and forth between mildly humorous space opera and tediously earnest environmental allegory. Because its title struck me as groaningly unfunny, I almost didn’t bother with Felonious Monk. But I’m glad I did. Like most Kotzwinkle books it bears little resemblance to any other Kotzwinkle book, except that it is funny and well written. Believe it or not, what it resembles most is one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. The main character is Tommy Martini, a young man whose grandfather was a prominent Mafia don. In college, Tommy was a promising wrestler with a national ranking. But, while working a part-time job as a bouncer at a dive bar, he accidentally (or not) killed an unruly patron. Thanks to his well-connected grandfather, Tommy escapes criminal prosecution, but his family decides it will be best if Tommy lies low for a while. Tommy’s Uncle, a crooked Catholic priest known as Father Vittorio, arranges for Tommy to spend time at a Catholic monastery in Mexico. As the novel opens, Tommy has been in the monastery for five years when he learns that Uncle Vittorio is on his deathbed. So Tommy leaves the monastery and travels to the small New Agey Arizona town where Vittorio lies near death. When Vittorio dies, Tommy inherits the bulk of the crooked priest’s estate. As a result, he winds up suspected of having come into possession of several million dollars that Vittorio has stolen from some extremely dangerous mobsters. Tommy swore off worldly possessions when he entered the monastery and, as a result, he arrived in Arizona, as Reacher would, owning little more than the clothes on his back. But, like Reacher, he is big, powerful, smart, and not the least bit intimidated by evildoers. He is also highly attractive to women and, having sworn off sex for the last five years, eager to make up for lost time.

Felonious Monk isn’t a spoof of the action/adventure novel. Though it pokes a bit of fun here and there, the book is a genuinely exciting crime tale full of sex, violence, and death. Most of the comedy comes from the phony-baloney New Age practices that nearly everyone Tommy meets in Arizona seems to either believe in or cynically traffic in. In the manner of classic pulp-fiction crime tales, Kotzwinkle keeps the chapters short, the dialog pithy, and the blood flowing. The book is filled with amusing observations about crime, many of them quotes from Tommy’s late grandfather, usually referred to as Primo. “After the first kill,” Primo used to tell neophyte hit men, “everyone else is just target practice.” Likewise, Primo used to insist that taking hostages was a bad idea, because “a captive may cry out – a dead man, never.” Had the book been written by Cormac McCarthy or John Irving, it would probably have been hailed as a late masterpiece from a living American literary legend. As it happened, the book was barely even reviewed.

Two years after the publication of Felonious Monk, Kotzwinkle published an equally impressive sequel, Bloody Martini. That book, too, got little attention from the press. As Bloody Martini opens, Tommy is in Mexico again, back at the monastery, where he spends much of his time searching the nearby terrain for herbs he can transplant to the gardens that he and his fellow monks maintain. One day, while wandering a mountainside with his herb sack, he sees two young thugs stop their SUV and try to drag off a couple of twelve-year-old girls who are out for a stroll. Tommy recognizes immediately that these men are human traffickers looking for goods to bring to market. He approaches the young men and, because he is dressed in the robes of a monk, they do not feel threatened by him. It is a big mistake on their part, but one they will not have much time to regret.

Soon Tommy is back at the monastery, where he finds that Finn Sweeney, an old high-school friend, has left a message on his cell phone. Sweeney was being murdered even as he left the message: “Take care of Bridget. My heart is in your hands.” Bridget is Sweeney’s wife – well, his widow now. Tommy had a crush on her in high school when she was Bridget Breen. He’s not sure what kind of trouble she’s in, but he flies back to his old hometown of Coalville to find out. Kotzwinkle doesn’t say so, but Coalville appears to be in Pennsylvania, the state in which Kotzwinkle was born and the third leading coal-producing state in the U.S.

Like its predecessor, Bloody Martini has plenty of pithy quotes from Grandfather Primo: “I’m always angry. It saves time.” After arriving in Coalville and discovering that Bridget has gone missing, Tommy goes on local television to directly address those responsible, telling the camera: “I’m coming for you.” When someone tells Tommy that he shouldn’t give away the element of surprise like that, he once again quotes Primo: “Let the pricks know you’re after them. It fucks with their nerve.”

In addition to contemporary thriller elements, the book also contains the kind of mildly sexist observations found in some of the best 1950s pulps: “She got up slowly from her chair – soft and round, and I don’t mean the chair.”

Even in a hardboiled crime novel, Kotzwinkle can’t help slipping into the mind of a dog now and then. At one point, a late-night car chase nearly kills a man who is out walking his dog. Kotzwinkle writes, “The dog got off a few barks – translation, this road is mine, motherfuckers.”

But Bloody Martini is more than just a crime novel. It is also an examination of (and ode to) the many working-class towns across America that have been left behind by globalization and the off-shoring of so many blue-collar jobs. Coalville is a ghost-haunted ruin, a former mining town whose abandoned mines now serve mainly as convenient places to hide dead bodies. Seams of unmined coal have caught fire far below the surface of the town, and the landscape is pockmarked with crevices where the smoke, and sometimes even the flames, of these fires are visible to the naked eye even as they pollute the air and make visibility more difficult. Deaths of despair are commonplace here, and Russian mobsters abound. At one point in the novel, Martini is part of a three-car chase that ends up at a local garbage dump:

“We entered a dystopian world of abandoned furniture, battered stoves, refrigerators, toilets, bathtubs. Adding to the feeling of a failed civilization was a huge crack that had opened at the heart of the dump, a mine fire having burned right up through the surface.”

I imagine it is difficult to write well about a fallen world unless you once loved it, at least a little bit, as Kotzwinkle seems to have loved the land of his Pennsylvania boyhood. And dystopias are nothing new to his work. Even his yuletide novel, Christmas at Fontaine’s, is less Miracle on 49^th Street than Nightmare on Elm Street (not surprising, since Kotzwinkle wrote the story on which Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master was based).

After not having published a novel since 2005, Kotzwinkle, 86, has published two in the last four years. It’s a trajectory somewhat similar to the late Cormac McCarthy’s, who hadn’t published a novel since 2006, and then released a pair of connected novels in late 2022. But McCarthy’s return was heralded far and wide, generating hundreds of column inches in newspapers and magazines across the globe. Alas, Kotzwinkle’s accomplishment, like the man himself, exists in a sort of twilight zone, highly admired by those who are aware of it, but not nearly as well-known as it should be. I fear that Kotzwinkle is the kind of writer who – like Philip K. Dick or Jim Thompson or Patricia Highsmith – won’t get his due from the literary establishment until after he is dead and gone. And what a bloody shame that would be.