Book Review: The Fan Man is a book in search of a superlative, because it totally deserves one. Grossest, funniest, weirdest, sickest, silliest ... so many might apply. It's impossible to pigeon hole this book, difficult to even describe. The closest might be A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) interleaved with Don Quixote (1605) and set in New York City, but even that isn't on the nose. Not for everyone and not always politically correct (our hero has an anachronistic and oddly comic antipathy for New York's puertorriqueños), this remnant of the Sixties is an artifact that shows the crumbling decline of that era in a ribald and futilely hopeful light. Our hero, the eponymous Fan Man, carries the unlikely name of Horse Badorties and is a nomadic hoarder (it makes sense in the book), living his "abominable life," who is in search of ... something ... everything: connection, dope, the perfect fan ("it's so cool"), the angelic voices of his own celestial choir. He is cleverly bewildered, incompetently functioning, always failing but always surviving. In his Introduction, T.C. Boyle acknowledges that Mr. Badorties may be "a caricature of the quintessential hippie stoner dropout," but he's also "the holy fool wholly fooled." I think The Fan Man might appeal particularly to those who have an affinity for the Sixties and the hippie ethos, but should connect with anyone who roots for the hapless undergod, the struggling idealist, for the one who tilts at windmills (after all what are windmills but giant fans?). All readers deserve the joy of being swept up in the slightly damaged stream-of-consciousness that is our protagonist:
At home: "What's this under here, man? It's the sink, man. I have found the sink. I'd recognize it anywhere ... wait a second, man ... it is not the sink but my Horse Badorties big stuffed easychair piled with dirty dishes. I must sit down and rest, man, I'm so tired from getting out of bed."
On the subway: "Lunatics everywhere. Happily I am fanning myself and wearing an overcoat so as not to be mistaken for a lunatic. I'm in the subway, man. What, man, am I doing in the subway?"
In the rain: "It is raining, man, at last. I have been carrying this gigantically heavy [hot dog cart] umbrella around for weeks ... and now the time has come, man, TO OPEN IT!"
The Fan Man is like nothing you've ever read (esp Chapter 21), endorsed by Kurt Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle, this is a novel that toils in obscurity, waiting to be read and make the reader laugh. [5★]
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