eBook Bigfoot Dreams download

I really liked the first two Francine Prose novels I read - "Blue Angel" and Household Saints" - and awarded each four stars. Unfortunately, I found "Bigfoot Dreams" to be a horse of a different color. Here, the focus remains on one quite unfocused character - Vera Perl, a 37 year old single mom who writes fictitious articles about Bigfoot and miracle cures for a magazine that makes the "National Enquirer" look downright authoritative. One of the more mundane articles that Vera writes turns out to be too close to the truth, which causes a resultantly unemployed Vera to embark on a sort of inner journey involving (along the way) her daughter, ex-husband, college roomate, and a group of "cryptobiologists" (it sounds more interesting than it is). But here's the problem. The author either bores the reader with the day-to-day minutia of Vera's life (like making a meal or visiting her parents), or futilely describes some experience which is supposed to be life-changing or meaningful. Honestly, I didn't really get what Prose was trying to tell us about Vera, or how Vera was supposedly learning something about herself. In fact, by the end of the book, Vera hasn't really learned anything at all, and even seems to have gotten worse (for instance, she starts smoking again). The little coincidences that pepper the story add up to a bunch of nothing.

Since I intend to read three more Francine Prose novels (which I'll review on this site), I'm very much hoping that "Bigfoot Dreams" is the author's nadir. I just don't think Prose really had a clear concept of what she wanted to write about, or who her main character (Vera) was supposed to be.

Having once been a newspaper reporter, I simply had to read this book. Immediately, I was delighted by the story of a reporter who's hired to make stories up for a sleazy tabloid rag. Here's a smart and funny way of turning the usual newspaper story on its ear: instead of looking for truth, the heroine avoids truth at all costs.
Along the way, we meet some fabulous characters: her blossoming pre-teen daughter, her ne-er do well absent hubby, a crazy hippy pal, parents who live to criticize, a love-torn co-worker. It all works well, especially when the Vera the reporter invents a story that turns out to be true. (And don't you love the name? Vera, which means true.)
The only reason I give this book three stars instead of five, is that the story complely fizzles out at the end. Fired for telling the truth, Vera goes on a long journey to get her life together, tries to reconnect with her husband, and essentially learns nothing. Unfortuntately, ths is Prose's worst flaw. She simply does not want to end the story, and certainly not in a satisfying way. Only in BLUE ANGEL, does she come to a real, albeit depressing, conclusion.
But for the first two-thirds of this book, it's beautifully and observantly written.

I picked up Bigfoot Dreams because I liked Prose's novel The Blue Angel. Blue Angel took a situation that seemed absolutely played out - aging professor in midlife throes has an affair with one of his female students - and made something astringent and revealing out of it.

Initially published in 1986, Bigfoot Dreams seems at first to be Ur-Chicklit. Consider the archetypes: our heroine, Vera, is a plucky single mom with an endearing but precocious ten year old daughter; Vera's parents are old lefties (Dad fought in the Spanish Civil War.); she has an off-again, on-again marriage to Lowell, A Good Man Who Just Can't Seem to Commit; her best friend is lovable but prone to crazy impulses; two delightful gay guys live next door; and she has the requisite quirky job, as a reporter for the type of tabloid that specializes in Elvis, Bigfoot and UFO sightings.

We follow Vera around New York City during a muggy summer of discontent. There's a lot of day to day life - some readers might think too much. We watch Vera chop vegetables, take the subway, empty the garbage, read the Sunday New York Times, sit through her daughter's ballet recital. In between, she engages in unfulfilling mating rituals with a coworker, gets in trouble at work over the bizarre coincidence of having a story she made up turn out to be true, worries about her parents and daughter, and pines for Lowell. Vera is a first wave feminist, at the point where the original proposition - we can have it all - is getting ground up in the day to day struggle, but no new synthesis has emerged.

Judging from the Amazon reader reviews, several reviewers found Vera a claustrophobic consciousness to travel in for a couple hundred pages. Part of the problem is the book's uneven tone. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Prose is satirizing or sympathizing. The reader's left wondering which emotional card to put down.

But Bigfoot Dreams is not so easily dismissed. As in The Blue Angel, Prose is mining everyday life to extract fresh meaning from it. In Vera's personal struggles, and in her tabloid stories, there's a tension between the dense, gravitational pull of the day to day and the desire to transcend it. Vera's job at the tabloid brings her in contact with people who are desperate to believe the stories she makes up. The America her readers live in seems as sun-blasted and empty as anything Camus' Stranger experienced on his African beach. Vera's personal journey leads her to the place where she realizes that one of the reasons she's so good as a tabloid writer is because her aspirations aren't so different from those of her readers: she wants a life that's bigger and richer than the one she's ended up with. Vera's made up stories have a perverse integrity. She'd rather invent lies and know she's doing it than settle for truths that are half-baked, facile or destructive.

Out of the particularity of Vera's life emerges a general portrait of the urban feminist intellectual, caught between the old certitudes she grew up with and murky new truths seen, like Bigfoot, only in unsatisfactory glimpses. The struggle to pin down those truths is worthy of our respect, and, despite its meandering plot, so is Bigfoot Dreams.