Bigfoot Dreams

You can walk into Vera Perl's Brooklyn apartment house and pick her out of a clutch of tenants: you will recognize her charged, speculative voice. She writes for a yellow rag called This Week, thinks in absurd, alliterative headlines and tailors her made-up stories to photographs taken as if by chance by her colleague Solomon. The fun begins when Solomon snaps two kids selling lemonade on a lawn in Flatbush, and Vera endows them with names and a psychiatrist father, and the water used in the lemonade with astonishing curative qualitiesall of which, except possibly the last, turns out to be true. The paper is slapped with a lawsuit, Vera is fired, her estranged husband Lowell flies in from Los Angeles for a night of love and leaves several days later with their daughter Rosalie. This gives Vera the chance, via a Cryptobiological Society meeting at the Grand Canyon, to pursue her dreams of the eponymous Bigfoot, a monster whose footprints are the size of bathtubs and whose arms shatter buildings with a single swipe. Prose's (Hungry Hearts account of these high jinks conveys every scene with psychedelic gusto, an authenticity of language and setting, and an acute sense of character. This is a lollapalooza of a novel, which keeps the reader hanging on every word and conjures believing out of make-believe. (April 23)