D-Tours

by Jonathan Baumbach

A dying woman, the love of his life, awaits Max, the narrator-hero, in his hotel room while he finds his way back, caught like a sleepwalker in a succession of daunting adventures, contending with, in part, vampires, spies, serial killers, femmes fatales, alien worlds, giant apes and mad scientists, all the time awaiting the return of his absent memory.

D-Tours is probably not on your itinerary; it is the evasive side-step you take that gets you everywhere. It is the private tour of America you take each night that you never quite shake yourself awake from to remember. Jonathan Baumbach's wild ride of a novel is a satire and celebration of movie narratives, running them one after another, one into another like fairy tales or cultural jetsam or primal dreams.

In another sense, D-Tours is a kind of 1001 Nights at the Drive-in. And you are there with the narrator-hero, like Scheherazade telling your story in every imaginable variation, because your very survival depends on reinventing the world.

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Born in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 1933. Married Annette Grant (fourth wife) on Dec. 18, 2004. Former wives: Naomi Miller, Elinor Berkman, Georgia Brown. Children: David, Nina, Noah and Nico. A.B (English) Brooklyn College, MFA (Playwriting) Columbia University, Ph.D (English and American Lit), Stanford University. Fellowships include Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Merrill. Invented in 1973 (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collective, the first fiction writers cooperative in America; reinvented in 1988 as FC2. An unintentionally well-kept secret among contemporary American novelists. Author of 14 books of fiction

Reviews

[Alexis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tales of a wild, film-inspired life threaded together and slightly masked.