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Kitten Trilogy #1
One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding
The American cult classic returns to print. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is a kind of beat bedroom farce. A college sophomore spends a weekend with a pretty 14-year-old black prostitute under the manly misapprehension that she has incited him because she finds him irresistible. The girl on the other hand, is convinced that it is all to be a paying proposition. Outraged when her guest resists payment, Kitten steals her rightful $100 fee from his pants pocket. He tries to get it back.
228 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
13 people are currently reading
302 people want to read
About the author
Robert Gover
30 books5 followersRobert Gover (November 2, 1929 – January 12, 2015) was an American journalist who became a best-selling novelist at age 30. His first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, a satire on American racism, remains a cult classic that helped break down America's fear of four-letter words and sexually explicit scenes, as well as sensitizing Americans to sanctimonious hypocrisy. Gover worked with writers for three decades.
Gover grew up in an endowed orphanage. Gover's father, Dr. Bryant A. Gover, was killed in an automobile accident when Robert was 11 months old. His mother, Anna Wall Gover, was preparing to move to Minnesota where Bryant was to study brain surgery. The death of his father left his mother desperate financially, just as the great depression of the 1930s was taking hold. Consequently, she entered Robert in Girard College, endowed by Stephen Girard in 1848. Girard provided an excellent basic education from grade school through high school. When Robert was a junior in high school, the Girard swimming team won first place in the Eastern States High School Championship Invitational. Robert swam the butterfly while it was developing and was still part of the breaststroke event. This provided Robert with opportunities for a higher education on athletic scholarship. He chose the University of Pittsburgh because of its outstanding creative writing program. Robert studied fiction writing under the guidance of Dr. Peterson. In his junior year at Pitt, Robert became interested in economic history and theories and switched his major, graduating with a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1952.
Gover worked as a journalist from 1952 till 1960. His first job was sports editor of the Greenville (Pennsylvania) Record-Argus. He then worked with several newspapers and publishing companies.
Gover's first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, was at first rejected by New York publishers, so his agent, American Literary Exchange, sent the manuscript to a French agent, Sergei Ouvaroff. Ouvaroff immediately placed it with a French publisher, La Table Ronde. With the success of the French edition he was published in USA with the Grove Press in October 1962. It rose up the Times bestseller list during a citywide printers union strike that shut down newspaper publication temporarily. It is the first book of a trilogy, completed by Here Goes Kitten (1964) and J.C. Saves (1968). Bob Dylan praised the novel in a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel on radio station WFMT.
Gover's second novel, The Maniac Responsible, was called "a work of art" by Newsweek magazine. Eight other novels have followed, the most recent being On the Run with Dick and Jane, published by Hopewell in 2007.
In 1965, Gover started studying astrology and in a couple of years started to relate astrology to stock market investment and economics. He also became friends with Jim Morrison of The Doors, and was arrested with him in a Las Vegas night club fracas in 1968.
Both as novelist and nonfiction writer, Gover has explored themes of pseudoscience and the occult. Voodoo Contra: Contradictory Meanings of the Word, deals with African-American polytheism as a serious and very ancient religion. In Time and Money: The Economy and the Planets, Gover claims evidence for a recurring planetary pattern that has coincided with great depressions, and predicted a very difficult economy and economic changes during the second decade of the 21st Century.
Gover grew up in an endowed orphanage. Gover's father, Dr. Bryant A. Gover, was killed in an automobile accident when Robert was 11 months old. His mother, Anna Wall Gover, was preparing to move to Minnesota where Bryant was to study brain surgery. The death of his father left his mother desperate financially, just as the great depression of the 1930s was taking hold. Consequently, she entered Robert in Girard College, endowed by Stephen Girard in 1848. Girard provided an excellent basic education from grade school through high school. When Robert was a junior in high school, the Girard swimming team won first place in the Eastern States High School Championship Invitational. Robert swam the butterfly while it was developing and was still part of the breaststroke event. This provided Robert with opportunities for a higher education on athletic scholarship. He chose the University of Pittsburgh because of its outstanding creative writing program. Robert studied fiction writing under the guidance of Dr. Peterson. In his junior year at Pitt, Robert became interested in economic history and theories and switched his major, graduating with a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1952.
Gover worked as a journalist from 1952 till 1960. His first job was sports editor of the Greenville (Pennsylvania) Record-Argus. He then worked with several newspapers and publishing companies.
Gover's first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, was at first rejected by New York publishers, so his agent, American Literary Exchange, sent the manuscript to a French agent, Sergei Ouvaroff. Ouvaroff immediately placed it with a French publisher, La Table Ronde. With the success of the French edition he was published in USA with the Grove Press in October 1962. It rose up the Times bestseller list during a citywide printers union strike that shut down newspaper publication temporarily. It is the first book of a trilogy, completed by Here Goes Kitten (1964) and J.C. Saves (1968). Bob Dylan praised the novel in a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel on radio station WFMT.
Gover's second novel, The Maniac Responsible, was called "a work of art" by Newsweek magazine. Eight other novels have followed, the most recent being On the Run with Dick and Jane, published by Hopewell in 2007.
In 1965, Gover started studying astrology and in a couple of years started to relate astrology to stock market investment and economics. He also became friends with Jim Morrison of The Doors, and was arrested with him in a Las Vegas night club fracas in 1968.
Both as novelist and nonfiction writer, Gover has explored themes of pseudoscience and the occult. Voodoo Contra: Contradictory Meanings of the Word, deals with African-American polytheism as a serious and very ancient religion. In Time and Money: The Economy and the Planets, Gover claims evidence for a recurring planetary pattern that has coincided with great depressions, and predicted a very difficult economy and economic changes during the second decade of the 21st Century.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
January 23, 2019
[Reposted with some lumpen digressions from the original review excised]:
Robert Gover's racial miscommunication satire, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, was a brief literary sensation for one blink of an eye in 1961, the perfect stuff of the Grove Press: transgressive, dirty, and sure to be misunderstood. It was probably not lost on Gover that the word "misunderstanding" in the book's title might also apply to the public's reaction to the book's message and the way in which it is conveyed. It didn't hurt, either, that one of its biggest fans was Bob Dylan.
The story is told from the perspectives of its two main characters. The first is 19-year-old JC, or Jimmie Holland, an insufferably self-clueless hypocritical conservative WASP frat boy who believes himself to be enlightened on all matters racial, sexual and political. He's all for morality as long as it applies to others and except when it suits himself to be immoral, and his assurances to himself and the readers to whom he is telling his part of the tale of his enlightened racial awareness are constantly contradicted and undercut by his complete ignorance and racist condescension. Intrigued by tales of the sexual prowess of black women told to him by a fellow frat blowhard, Hank, JC decides to go slumming in the exotic world of the ghetto and at a brothel meets a 14-year-old prostitute named Kitten (who lies about her age, claiming to be 16). Kitten rocks JC's world sexually, though, like so many other things in the book he mistakes her sexually superior knowledge and technique for a form of ignorance, since he couldn't possibly be less than the great Lothario he believes himself to be. Kitten's lack of formal education and heavy dialect do not mask her street smarts, but the series of miscommunications that result from the clash of these two cultural opposites leads to the eponymous "$100 misunderstanding" and the comical attempts to undo it. Convinced that he has rocked her world, JC believes that Kitten is interested in him not as a client but as a boyfriend and therefore he is no longer obligated to pay her for sex. Kitten, who has no such understanding, gets hold of the hefty $100 fee due her when JC takes to her apartment for the weekend. JC, taken aback at this turn of events, thinks his money has been "stolen" from him and conflict results.
The book is a series of comical scenarios that arise from the complete lack of verbal and cultural understanding between these two characters. The story begins with JC telling his version of the story and thereafter the chapters alternate between his first-person narrative and Kitten's first-person interpretation of the events. Of course, their versions differ markedly, and the confusions are sometimes quite funny.
The whole idea of the book is a good one, and at a time when the civil rights movement was at its height it certainly would have been an appropriately potent plea for whites and blacks to listen to one another for mutual benefit. JC would serve as exhibit A in the present discussion over "White Privilege." The problem of the book is in the execution, which on one level is hilarious and on another level is cringe-inducing. Robert Gover was a white writer, and his attempt to render Kitten's black dialogue is often more funny for its ineptitude and inaccuracy than for the intended satirical points of the wordplay. I mean, did any black person ever really routinely refer to himself or herself as "Pickanniny blackass me", much less in 1961? What urban American black person in 1961 would have referred to a television set as a "glassface" unless they were actually, as Gover seems to think, exotic relics of a forgotten tribe who just emerged from the last uncharted jungle of Africa? Sometimes he just takes the ebonics in extremis dialogue too far for credulity and takes the reader outside the story, breaking the wall and making the reader more than a little perplexed.
JC's narrative is rendered in a kind of Holden-Caulfied-on-caffeine manner that screams, "Look, I'm being spontaneous and conversational." Of course, JC's supposed to be insufferable, but Gover often seems worried that you're too dense to grasp that and thus piles so many stupidities onto his character that he becomes as two-dimensional as an editorial cartoon; the kind where big fat cigar-smoking dudes have "G.O.P." stretched across their tuxes.
The book is an odd period piece, and I might--were my critical acumen blunted--call it dated except that I hate condemning anything simply for being of its time. It would be better to call it "something of its moment," something that may have captured a momentary zeitgeist and fitfully amused in its day but which is now problematic.
Robert Gover's racial miscommunication satire, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, was a brief literary sensation for one blink of an eye in 1961, the perfect stuff of the Grove Press: transgressive, dirty, and sure to be misunderstood. It was probably not lost on Gover that the word "misunderstanding" in the book's title might also apply to the public's reaction to the book's message and the way in which it is conveyed. It didn't hurt, either, that one of its biggest fans was Bob Dylan.
The story is told from the perspectives of its two main characters. The first is 19-year-old JC, or Jimmie Holland, an insufferably self-clueless hypocritical conservative WASP frat boy who believes himself to be enlightened on all matters racial, sexual and political. He's all for morality as long as it applies to others and except when it suits himself to be immoral, and his assurances to himself and the readers to whom he is telling his part of the tale of his enlightened racial awareness are constantly contradicted and undercut by his complete ignorance and racist condescension. Intrigued by tales of the sexual prowess of black women told to him by a fellow frat blowhard, Hank, JC decides to go slumming in the exotic world of the ghetto and at a brothel meets a 14-year-old prostitute named Kitten (who lies about her age, claiming to be 16). Kitten rocks JC's world sexually, though, like so many other things in the book he mistakes her sexually superior knowledge and technique for a form of ignorance, since he couldn't possibly be less than the great Lothario he believes himself to be. Kitten's lack of formal education and heavy dialect do not mask her street smarts, but the series of miscommunications that result from the clash of these two cultural opposites leads to the eponymous "$100 misunderstanding" and the comical attempts to undo it. Convinced that he has rocked her world, JC believes that Kitten is interested in him not as a client but as a boyfriend and therefore he is no longer obligated to pay her for sex. Kitten, who has no such understanding, gets hold of the hefty $100 fee due her when JC takes to her apartment for the weekend. JC, taken aback at this turn of events, thinks his money has been "stolen" from him and conflict results.
The book is a series of comical scenarios that arise from the complete lack of verbal and cultural understanding between these two characters. The story begins with JC telling his version of the story and thereafter the chapters alternate between his first-person narrative and Kitten's first-person interpretation of the events. Of course, their versions differ markedly, and the confusions are sometimes quite funny.
The whole idea of the book is a good one, and at a time when the civil rights movement was at its height it certainly would have been an appropriately potent plea for whites and blacks to listen to one another for mutual benefit. JC would serve as exhibit A in the present discussion over "White Privilege." The problem of the book is in the execution, which on one level is hilarious and on another level is cringe-inducing. Robert Gover was a white writer, and his attempt to render Kitten's black dialogue is often more funny for its ineptitude and inaccuracy than for the intended satirical points of the wordplay. I mean, did any black person ever really routinely refer to himself or herself as "Pickanniny blackass me", much less in 1961? What urban American black person in 1961 would have referred to a television set as a "glassface" unless they were actually, as Gover seems to think, exotic relics of a forgotten tribe who just emerged from the last uncharted jungle of Africa? Sometimes he just takes the ebonics in extremis dialogue too far for credulity and takes the reader outside the story, breaking the wall and making the reader more than a little perplexed.
JC's narrative is rendered in a kind of Holden-Caulfied-on-caffeine manner that screams, "Look, I'm being spontaneous and conversational." Of course, JC's supposed to be insufferable, but Gover often seems worried that you're too dense to grasp that and thus piles so many stupidities onto his character that he becomes as two-dimensional as an editorial cartoon; the kind where big fat cigar-smoking dudes have "G.O.P." stretched across their tuxes.
The book is an odd period piece, and I might--were my critical acumen blunted--call it dated except that I hate condemning anything simply for being of its time. It would be better to call it "something of its moment," something that may have captured a momentary zeitgeist and fitfully amused in its day but which is now problematic.
November 29, 2007
Actually, this book is such a bizarre period piece that I stopped finding it offensive after a few pages and merely found it inexplicable. I suppose it does a fairly effective job of illustrating the cultural differences between a pretentious white frat boy and a teenaged black prostitute, but there's also no discernible plot or character development that stems from their interaction. They bumble through a weekend and then no one's really the better or worse for it... frankly, I'm surprised that it got published, much less reprinted, although I suppose the titillation for readers made it a pretty hot commodity for a while.
I found the paperback copy from the 60s free at a shop and picked it up because the cover was so ridiculous. :-P
I found the paperback copy from the 60s free at a shop and picked it up because the cover was so ridiculous. :-P
December 7, 2008
One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is structured as alternating monologues by two characters: J.C. Holland (a white male college student) and Kitten (a black female prostitute). With the voice of J.C. Holland, Gover expresses “the ignorance and arrogance that is at the heart of racism”. And with the voice of Kitten, Robert Gover not only captures nuances of the then current “black slang” (like one of my favorite words: ofay), but conveys a paradigm shift that brings both characters to life.
Read the full review on my blog.
Read the full review on my blog.
December 21, 2008
Another hard cover first edition found at my neighborhood Books & Books. Delicious.
Also nabbed a copy of Here Goes Kitten, the 2nd in Gover's JC Trilogy, & the third pulp classic I picked up in a nice first ed. over the last week or so.
Gotta luv Mitchell Kaplan!
Also nabbed a copy of Here Goes Kitten, the 2nd in Gover's JC Trilogy, & the third pulp classic I picked up in a nice first ed. over the last week or so.
Gotta luv Mitchell Kaplan!
December 30, 2020
A slight but interesting story almost completely derailed by having every other chapter written in the 'voice' of a 14 year old, black prostitute. Damn near unreadable - insulting and racist. A novel of its time in every way.
October 19, 2009
one of the most underrated books of the 60s.
Read
August 23, 2024rec'd positive comparisons on the flap of the ancient copy of candy i read. neatest aspect is prob how it problematizes the notion of being "articulate:" as grammatical & polite as the JC-penned sections are, it's kitten who gets across who she is & paints the more effective picture of what's going on. the downfall imo is that nothing much happens; @ 1st glance it looks like a picaresque but those are supposed to be, like, rich in incident & stuff. would likely still pick up 2nd & 3rd in trilogy if they materialized in a used bookstore. big ups from gore vidal on the back cover in case you care!
February 5, 2022
Interesting story. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding had its 15 minutes of fame when it got published and earned some fairly high praise from the likes of Gore Vidal, Henry Miller, and Bob Dylan. The story is told by two narrators alternating chapters. James Cartwright Holland, or Jimmy, is a college sophomore is reminiscent of a slightly older and more prudish and hypocritical Holden Caulfield, convinced he is smarter and more clever than everyone else. Kitten is a 14-year-old prostitute, uneducated and illiterate, able to speak only in her street slang. Both narrators are convinced that the other is exceedingly unintelligent.
One weekend Jimmy decides to visit a local brothel and eventually winds up in Kitten's apartment for the weekend. As the story unfolds, the novel is far less about sex than about race and class. Very much a product of its era, Gover's novel is a fascinating read.
One weekend Jimmy decides to visit a local brothel and eventually winds up in Kitten's apartment for the weekend. As the story unfolds, the novel is far less about sex than about race and class. Very much a product of its era, Gover's novel is a fascinating read.
August 14, 2013
Dated in one way but again relevant in an age of increasing gentrification. The black character is certainly a stereotype as stated in other comments but the clueless, ruthless rich white frat boy is similarly extreme. That contrast of stereotypes isn't a negative, it is why it remains relevant.
September 9, 2009
Good perspectives. Main character was an intolerable douche, as I kind of expected.
November 25, 2009
an encounter alternately related by a white fraternity boy and a black prostitute. they don't seem to agree on anything that happened ...
October 6, 2011
Hated it..........
July 14, 2013
Great book showing the point of view of different people and cultures. Makes you think and also laugh!
June 29, 2018
I'm not sure why I kept reading this book. Life is too short.
January 11, 2017
I read this book in the 60's and have never forgotten it. I am glad to see it is back in print and that I am not the only one who thought it was fascinating
April 22, 2025
Excerpt from Peter Sloterdijk's book Bubbles: Spheres I: “From the outset, there is a process of world literature competing with the rise of the external, the foreign, the fortuitous and those forces that threaten to burst the sphere; its aim is to settle every outside, no matter how cruel and unfitting, all demons of the negative and monsters of foreignness, within an expanded inside. Context turns into text-as often and as long as the external is worked away or reduced to tolerable formats. In this sense, order is above all the effect of a transference from interior to exterior. What we know as the metaphysical worldviews of Old Europe and Asia are the tensest ascetic drawings-in of the foreign, the dead and the external into the circle of soul-animated, text-woven large scale interiors. Until yesterday, their poets were the thinkers. They taught the citizens of being how to achieve symbiosis with the stars and the stones; they interpreted the outside as an educator. Hegel's great synthesis is the last European monument to this will to draw all negativity and externality into the inside of a logically sealed dome. But philosophy could not have erected its sublime constructions without the mandate of its carrier culture, and logical syntheses presuppose the political and military situations that demand such symbolic vaulting; their exoteric mission-living on a large scale, ruling over palaces and distant borders-requires consolidation through metaphysical knowledge. The first philosophy is the last transference. Novalis would go on to lift the secret when he interpreted thought allied with writing as a general homecoming: "Where are we going? Always home." The total parental home does not want to lose even the most foreign elements. On all paths to high culture, sphere extension and growing inclusivity dictate the law by which consciousness develops. What we call growing up consists of these strenuous resettlings of smaller subjectivities in larger world forms; often, it simultaneously means the reformatting of the tribal consciousness to suit imperial and text-supported circumstances. For the child we were, the expanded space of interaction may be the large family for a while; as soon as the familial horizon is exeded, however, the more developed social forms stake their claims to form and animate the individuals.”
Gover's book One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is truly revolutionary in capturing two examples of the above systematized social consciousnesses (the future arbiter of national culture and power [the college student]) and the subject of that system [the exploited, black, preteen sex-worker]) in contention with each other. Ultimately you come to realize that one's ability to interpret High Culture comes down to said interpreter entering into a enabling priesthood of this imperialist ontology that seeks to settle other subjectivities that still manage to exist outside of the Western super culture. The most important, human decision someone with these interpretive capabilities can do is to understand western ideology and its expressions as a trivial yet domineering protective bubble against an antagonized and feared chaos and recognize that it is not a superior universal way of being but a massively self-aggrandizing program; what is next is to eradicate any vestige of superiority within your person and help people understand the true subjectivity of ways of being and to join the effort to create space for other ontologies because that is the most truly radical thing an "educated" person can do.
This goes beyond some bland libertarian or multicultural ideal, in a fractured, rhizomatic world such as this it is imperative that these ontologies are allowed to exist so that people might be able to choose which way or blends of ways of being are most suitable for them and for the depopulation of a coercive, fascist system of cultural production. Community in this system is still possible as long as people do not allow their individual egos to overly exert itself on the whole.
Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo is another fantastic send up which articulates the battle between the hegemonic, order-driven west and the cyclically emergent cult of a greater humanity which doesn't seek to sow division to flatten and continually make distinctions but instead seeks to live in harmony with the unpredictable rhythm of nature and the community. Reed's contention is more generalized in that he suggests that there is a recurrent urge in humanity towards models that take the form of his idealized cultural model, but that negative, disjunctive, and anti-social tendencies gather in opposition to it in the form of a selfish and solipsistic power elite.
For a long time, there was no going back or retrieving and restoring the obliterated ontologies of cultures crushed underfoot by the colossus of the West, and, until recently, it certainly was not going to be performed by the cold, appropriative proboscis of western culture known as anthropology. It was only recently that a revolution of any significance occurred in that discipline with the appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, but its revolutionary leader was killed before any momentum could be capitalized.
Peter Sloterdijk seems to indicate that these old ontologies oughtn't be revived for some blindly idealized praxis because their users were the only ones who needed them like specialized temporal equipment, which I can believe and appreciate. I do believe that the discipline which Sloterdijk seeks to create called "Sphereology" or treating history as an examination of the making, sustaining and breaking of a series of coexisting bubbles of communal ontologies as islands in time could create instructive examples of different ways of being which could act as revolutionary counterfactuals to our current ontological straight jacket situation which Mark Fisher details in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?.
At the face of things, this is a choicely absurd book to lay down this level of analysis on. But despite the transgressive surface, this book (along with the other books linked here) should be treated as an distillation of the elusive ontological power relations which has been haunting the West and its subjects since the early modern period.
Gover's book One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is truly revolutionary in capturing two examples of the above systematized social consciousnesses (the future arbiter of national culture and power [the college student]) and the subject of that system [the exploited, black, preteen sex-worker]) in contention with each other. Ultimately you come to realize that one's ability to interpret High Culture comes down to said interpreter entering into a enabling priesthood of this imperialist ontology that seeks to settle other subjectivities that still manage to exist outside of the Western super culture. The most important, human decision someone with these interpretive capabilities can do is to understand western ideology and its expressions as a trivial yet domineering protective bubble against an antagonized and feared chaos and recognize that it is not a superior universal way of being but a massively self-aggrandizing program; what is next is to eradicate any vestige of superiority within your person and help people understand the true subjectivity of ways of being and to join the effort to create space for other ontologies because that is the most truly radical thing an "educated" person can do.
This goes beyond some bland libertarian or multicultural ideal, in a fractured, rhizomatic world such as this it is imperative that these ontologies are allowed to exist so that people might be able to choose which way or blends of ways of being are most suitable for them and for the depopulation of a coercive, fascist system of cultural production. Community in this system is still possible as long as people do not allow their individual egos to overly exert itself on the whole.
Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo is another fantastic send up which articulates the battle between the hegemonic, order-driven west and the cyclically emergent cult of a greater humanity which doesn't seek to sow division to flatten and continually make distinctions but instead seeks to live in harmony with the unpredictable rhythm of nature and the community. Reed's contention is more generalized in that he suggests that there is a recurrent urge in humanity towards models that take the form of his idealized cultural model, but that negative, disjunctive, and anti-social tendencies gather in opposition to it in the form of a selfish and solipsistic power elite.
For a long time, there was no going back or retrieving and restoring the obliterated ontologies of cultures crushed underfoot by the colossus of the West, and, until recently, it certainly was not going to be performed by the cold, appropriative proboscis of western culture known as anthropology. It was only recently that a revolution of any significance occurred in that discipline with the appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, but its revolutionary leader was killed before any momentum could be capitalized.
Peter Sloterdijk seems to indicate that these old ontologies oughtn't be revived for some blindly idealized praxis because their users were the only ones who needed them like specialized temporal equipment, which I can believe and appreciate. I do believe that the discipline which Sloterdijk seeks to create called "Sphereology" or treating history as an examination of the making, sustaining and breaking of a series of coexisting bubbles of communal ontologies as islands in time could create instructive examples of different ways of being which could act as revolutionary counterfactuals to our current ontological straight jacket situation which Mark Fisher details in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?.
At the face of things, this is a choicely absurd book to lay down this level of analysis on. But despite the transgressive surface, this book (along with the other books linked here) should be treated as an distillation of the elusive ontological power relations which has been haunting the West and its subjects since the early modern period.
August 17, 2019
The strangest thing about Robert Gover's One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is that it somehow sneaked by the censors back in 1961. It is a book with considerable charm and remarkably little prurient sex considering the sexual situations of a college student with a 14-year-old Black prostitute.
Misunderstanding is the key word. Both James C Holland, an Eastern college student, and Kitty, the prostitute are strangely clueless. The misunderstanding in question relates to payment for sex from a prostitute. The college student somehow assumes that a single $10 covers a whole weekend of whoopee, which it never did. Kitty speaks in a thick dialect which (I surmise) protects her from the censors.
While I liked the general situation, I felt the book goes on too long multiplying unlikely situations.
Misunderstanding is the key word. Both James C Holland, an Eastern college student, and Kitty, the prostitute are strangely clueless. The misunderstanding in question relates to payment for sex from a prostitute. The college student somehow assumes that a single $10 covers a whole weekend of whoopee, which it never did. Kitty speaks in a thick dialect which (I surmise) protects her from the censors.
While I liked the general situation, I felt the book goes on too long multiplying unlikely situations.
September 29, 2022
I remember when this was finally published in the States and the good reviews it got, especially the rave from Time. I can see that it might then have been a revelation to many, and that it merited good reviews at the time. Over 6o years later, though, it just made my skin crawl. Gover's preface to this edition now offers far better insights into American race relations (the provision of which seems to have been his goal) than his novel. The characters are extreme stereotypes, their first-person accounts provided Gover with no opportunity to display other literary qualities, and I gave up about halfway through. Your opinion may differ.
January 4, 2024
Gelezen (herlezen) in Nederlandse vertaling van de hand van John Vandenbergh (De Bezige Bij, 1964). Deze heeft hiermee een schier onmogelijke klus geklaard, meer in het bijzonder waar het gaat om het taalgebruik van het veertienjarige zwarte hoertje dat, in afwisseling met de negentienjarige blanke student die van haar diensten gebruikmaakt, verslag doet van hun veelbewogen weekend samen. Op zich een aantrekkelijk en amusant gegeven, dat echter wordt uitgewerkt op een manier die in de loop van het boek enigszins begint tegen te staan.
March 29, 2025
Näher untersuchen auf Parallelen zu Feridun Zaimoglu (künstlicher Soziolekt). Die Übersetzung war sicherlich ein Wagnis. Jedenfalls unterhaltsam.
Der Buchrücken zeugt von scheußlichen Urteilen (die 14jährige Kitten ein "Hürchen").
Bestseller bei Erscheinen, in Deutschland völlig vergessen, wie es scheint.
Der Buchrücken zeugt von scheußlichen Urteilen (die 14jährige Kitten ein "Hürchen").
Bestseller bei Erscheinen, in Deutschland völlig vergessen, wie es scheint.
May 29, 2025
wholly unreadable. I can not believe Gore Vidal of all people had anything good to say about this book. I'd rather read Henry Miller or even Erskine Caldwell than this rubbish. repetitive, simplistic prose with too heavy and emphasis placed on the dialect. half the time, you don't even know who's talking. I read 50 pages and stopped. Life is too short.
December 12, 2017
This might be my favorite novel of all time!
March 7, 2019
Chad Kultgen's "The Average American Male" is a descendent of this book.
It's broad and dated and, yeah, a bit much, but with a purity of purpose.
It's broad and dated and, yeah, a bit much, but with a purity of purpose.
March 31, 2025
I can’t say I wholly enjoyed the time I spent with it, quite farce, can appreciate the fact this book had its time and place, an explicit portrayal of the ignorance and arrogance of racism
Bob Dylan recommendation
Bob Dylan recommendation
June 7, 2012
Couldn't get through this. It was mildly entertaining, but the depiction of the female lead--an African American hooker-- was unreal. I don't believe for a second that a woman in ANY era would refer to herself as a "pickaninny". It was obvious to me the author was a white man. The book jacket has rave reviews from famous folks, but it causes me to question whether they actually read it or worse, if they're really that clueless about other ethnicities.
November 18, 2011
Read through the reviews and you'll find that they run the gamut. Some people love it, some absolutely hate it.
Me, I love it and would give it four stars except that I read the Kindle edition and the formatting was terrible. It looks like an unedited OCR job without so much as a bit of extra space separating the two points of view.
Other than that, it's funny and ribald and carries an essential truth that hasn't changed much in the fifty years it was written.
Me, I love it and would give it four stars except that I read the Kindle edition and the formatting was terrible. It looks like an unedited OCR job without so much as a bit of extra space separating the two points of view.
Other than that, it's funny and ribald and carries an essential truth that hasn't changed much in the fifty years it was written.
July 29, 2010
This was one of a bunch of books in Dad's stocking drawer in the parental bedroom while I was a child. Since they were hidden, I was interested and probably read them all, seeking forbidden knowledge and titillation.
This novel, however, was pretty disappointing. There is some sex in it, yes, but the emphasis is on class, race and gender relations from a liberal perspective.
This novel, however, was pretty disappointing. There is some sex in it, yes, but the emphasis is on class, race and gender relations from a liberal perspective.
Want to read
June 30, 2014will probably hate this.
found it today on a swap rack in a local cafe.
has raves on the back from Henry Miller and Gore Vidal but that is most likely from the sensationalist subject matter: white college boy spends weekend with underaged black prostitute, told in alternating first-person chapters.
I imagine her chapters will be less (much less) than believable.
found it today on a swap rack in a local cafe.
has raves on the back from Henry Miller and Gore Vidal but that is most likely from the sensationalist subject matter: white college boy spends weekend with underaged black prostitute, told in alternating first-person chapters.
I imagine her chapters will be less (much less) than believable.
November 23, 2007
This book was probably too old and I was probably too young to understand all the racial/cultural implications of this prostitute (I didn't know what a "trick" was--the jargon threw me).
In 11th grade I wrote it was "slow, character study" repetitive and hard to understand"
In 11th grade I wrote it was "slow, character study" repetitive and hard to understand"
March 8, 2011
A friend recommended this book to me. It was an O.K. read. Basically two characters taking turns explaining their side of a story from two totally different perspectives. At times amusing, but generally filler.
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