SYNOPSIS
First she sunk into a deep depression, then she sunk into a bathtub of boiling soup. “Soup is Served!” the call goes, and the reader finds Miss Pumpernickel Bread serving an entire town with a ladle. The final bowl, which has been absorbed by her body, she pours directly from her bladder into the bowl of a seven-year-old boy. Amidst a standing ovation, Kevin eats his serving, Miss Pumpernickel Bread dies, and a legend begins. Kevin’s bowl, believed by some to contain her character traits, ideology, and philosophy, alters the consciousness of his society. Whether the ingredients alter his DNA or if it is only in the economic interests of his town to believe that they have, Kevin’s stomach becomes the site of a personal and social identity crisis that not only causes a lifetime of psychological indigestion but also captivates the media and bolsters the economy of newly named Souptown.
While a local folktale writer records source material for Kevin in Tales in the Life and Opinions of Miss Pumpernickel Bread, Kevin ages into his new role. His classmates ridicule him for drinking urine, and his elementary school teachers praise him for his great expectations. A math teacher discovers that Kevin only learns from the periphery but can’t learn the subject of his focus. At fourteen Kevin is moved secretly by Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s activist sister, Sarah FoldEconomy. He wakes up at age eighteen leaving a three-year gap for himself, the other characters, and readers. While the residents of Souptown desperately seek their hero — the key to their economic survival — Kevin identifies with film stars like Tom Cruise and challenges the machismo of army recruiters and police officers. A motorcycle accident leads him into age seventy-five where he gives a lecture on Currency in the voice of Sarah FoldEconomy to a group of fellow senior citizens who express their criticism by pelting him with rubberbands.
At age ninety-five, the centrifugal force generated by his lack of focus on a jigsaw puzzle shoots Kevin from his wheelchair back to age thirty. He lands in the traumas of finding a “successful” job. The learning disability the math teacher left untaught reveals itself. Kevin’s two most important role models, Father Paisley, an extreme rightist Catholic priest, and the extreme leftist Sarah FoldEconomy, confront each other over Kevin’s future. Faced with the decision to hide from or claim his identity, Kevin tries to escape responsibility by taking a hunting trip. His as-of-yet concealed identity ends up face-to-face with the national media when he shoots another hunter in the chest.
Newspaper and television sources take over the narration and confuse the true identity of the killer, the dead hunter, and Kevin. Three individuals try to claim Kevin’s name in order to snatch the limelight and the economic benefits that will result. A court case draws in references and witnesses from the previous narrative of Kevin’s life. Finally, Sarah FoldEconomy executes her vendetta in the full courthouse by bathing in a broth of her own.
Miss Pumpernickel Bread is a metafictional economic satire about a bowl of soup. Through the characters of the deceased Miss Pumpernickel Bread, Father Paisley, Sarah FoldEconomy, and Kevin, the narrative offers a Brothers Karamozov cocktail of opposing ideologies to examine. The reader is left not only to judge the identity or “guilt” of Kevin, but also to weigh the level of objective truth presented in fiction. By using satire, the novel empowers the reader, rather than moralizes, by showing how this novel and its interpretation, and all novels and their interpretations, are often used as vehicles for subjectivity — the writer’s and the reader’s. The seriousness with which the novel takes its comic execution places it between the literary non-traditions of Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, and Denis Diderot and those of Robert Coover, Italo Calvino, Ishmael Reed, and Donald Barthelme. This book is best shelved somewhere between Pinocchio and Foucault’s Pendulum; Alice in Wonderland and Infinite Jest; and The Butter Battle Book and The Song of Percival Peacock.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THIS WEB EDITION:
Surely Mark Twain, Jonathon Swift, and Ed Kienholz weren’t afraid to tell a few “stretchers”. Umberto Eco said of the mission and fate of parody: “It must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile – and without a blush – in steadfast, virile seriousness.” In the years since this was written (1997), a woman in Florida who fell into a comatose state, contestedly as a result of an eating disorder, had been repeatedly force-fed and starved by those people that loved her most and by those who only loved the political use they could put her to; the destruction of the symbolic Twin Towers for the cause of radical politics mixed with radical religion led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, and the aftereffects continue in both New York and the Middle East; yesterday’s TV childhood stars have paraded in front of today’s nostalgic audiences in TV shows like The Surreal Life and Celebrity Boxing as networks profit from shining the limelight on their failed great expectations, meanwhile the same fans who publicly mourned the death of Princess Diana still fail to accept the blame for paying the paparazzi to chase her down; Kevin has become both the metaphorical father and child-of-questionable-paternity of Anna Nicole Smith; and Bernie Madoff, without intending to, accomplished at least half of Sarah FoldEconomy's goal while Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett valiantly whittle away at the other. For centuries people have been killing each other over what Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, and the prophets never said – giving voice to God who we have never agreed exists in the first place – using their dead bodies and physical absence as credibility vouchers to say whatever suits their best interests. A prophet has become a casket retrofit into a magic box that anyone can use to stuff in what absolutely will not fit in order to create the illusion that it does. There is more than one way to turn a profit. Just as yesterday’s prophets have become fictional characters, Miss Pumpernickel Bread is a modern American prophet in the religion of consumption. Kevin is the flotsam left at the wake with her tub.
Miss Pumpernickel Bread is not the heartfelt comical memoir of the author’s little brother’s battle with cancer, or his wild childhood running with scissors, or the antics of her big fat, “crazy”, Greek, or otherwise, family. It is a foremoir; a preminiscence of the American family; a melting pot-belly with acid-reflux engorged by growth hormones and afflicted by never-before-possible bio- and neuro-engineered food allergies; a gumbo of ideology, religion, confusion, and persuasion. It is manipulative and revealing, disgusting and refreshing, funny and hideous, and if it doesn’t inspire laughter it might just as well induce vomiting.
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