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A Review of The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
Move over, Bill Bennett—the inimitable short story master George Saunders (Pastoralia) and acclaimed illustrator Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales) have created an astonishing new book of virtues for the child in all of us. Alternately haunting and hilarious, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip reaffirms the age-old message of the Golden Rule while simultaneously lampooning the great American institutions of social conservatism and religious chauvinism, along with its inbred kissing cousin, evangelical consumerism.
For as long as anyone can remember, the inhabitants of the tiny seaside village of Frip have raised goats, eking out a living by supplying the neighboring villages with goat milk. For just as long, Frip has been plagued by a colony of dim-witted, multi-eyed, goat-loving aquatic cockleburs known as gappers. Each morning the gappers wriggle from the waves to serenade the smelly objects of their affection and, each day, the weary children of Frip dutifully remove the pests with gapper-brushes, collect them in gapper-sacks, and toss them back into the sea.
As all good things must come to an end—in parables, allegories, and illustrated fables, anyway—the day soon comes when the staid Frippian monoculture must confront a radically new paradigm. More specifically, one morning, a moderately less-stupid gapper realizes that one of the village's three houses is considerably closer to the water's edge than the other two and, for efficiency's sake, he urges his fellow gappers to concentrate their goat-addled adorations on this single location. For the neighboring Romo and Ronson families, this newly gapperless situation is the occasion for considerable self-congratulatory enthusiasm. However, for young Capable and her recently widowed father, who now must treble their gapper-brushing, sacking, and tossing efforts, this turn of events is overwhelming.
Capable's appeals for neighborly assistance are greeted with pompous disbelief ("Are those gappers our gappers? Are those goats our goats?), and her attempts to get rid of the gappers, while ingenious, end in failure...until she decides upon a course of action so simple—and yet so radical—that nothing and no one in the village of Frip will ever be the same.
—Greg Marrs
Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction
An illustrated modern fable about the virtues of hard work, the hassle of bad neighbors, and the "Golden Rule."
Nicely illustrated by fifty-two haunting and hilarious illustrations by Lane Smith, The Very Persistent Gappers Of Frip is a multi-layered morality tale for adults told in George Saunders distinctive, quirky, soulful style. A great adult fable, this remarkable and memorable tale is set in a village called Frip where goat's milk is the sole economy and the population is three families (the Romos, the Ronsens, and a little girl named Capable along with her widowed father). The Very Persistent Gappers Of Frip is one of those off-beat and original stories that will be read and re-read by generations of appreciative readers.
Bookpage
A fairy tale for mature audiences. . . Growing up, I laughed at the same jokes my parents did when watching television shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle or, later, The Simpsons. As an adult, I understood why they were laughing, and the jokes became much funnier. In other words, while children will enjoy The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, only adults will fully appreciate it. . . Right below the surface are issues like parental responsibility, abandonment, and the absence of a social safety net, to name a few examples. As you turn the pages, you'll discover the real magic of the book: characters that make you smile, because you know someone like these fascinating residents of Frip.
U.S. News & World Report
Lane Smith's manic, moody illustrations are suffused with misery, then joy, as Frip learns self-reliance.
Lisa Schwarzbaum
In a perfect world, every child would own a copy of this profound, funny fable about sharing and selfishness and stupidity and independent thinking and how the world is and how it ought to be...They'd all delight in the cockeyed story and the energetic drawing style...Every adult would own a copy too, and would marvel at how this smart, subversive little book written by the effervescently original author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is even deeper and more hilarious than any child could know.
—Entertainment Weekly
From the Publisher
Praise for George Saunders
“No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time.”—Khaled Hosseini
“George Saunders is a complete original. . . . There is no one better, no one more essential to our national sense of self and sanity.”—Dave Eggers
“Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith
Praise for The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
“In a perfect world, every child would own a copy of this profound, funny fable. . . . Every adult would own a copy too, and would marvel at how this smart, subversive little book is even deeper and more hilarious than any child could know.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Saunders’s idiosyncratic voice makes an almost perfect accompaniment to children’s book illustrator Smith’s heightened characterizations and slightly surreal backdrops.”—Publishers Weekly
“A riveting, funny, and sly new fairy tale.”—Miami Herald
