Our Napoleon in Rags

by Kirby Gann

Overview

From a writer called “an important new voice in fiction” by Bret Lott and a “novelist of daring creativity and passion” by Edmund White, comes Our Napoleon in Rags. It’s the story of the regulars at the Don Quixote, a bar in a decaying Midwestern city, whose lives are torn apart when their self-appointed “Napoleon,” Haycraft Keebler, bipolar son of a famous local politician, falls in love with a 15-year-old male hustler. Weaving the hot-button issues of mental illness, pedophilia, racism and police brutality through a novel that is Victorian in its graceful storytelling, Kirby Gann has created not only an extraordinary read, but a biting commentary on contemporary America.

Kirby Gann is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and teaches in the MFA program at Spalding University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935439455
Publisher:	Ig Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	335 KB

About the Author

Kirby Gann's first novel, The Barbarian Parade, was called "a striking debut for a novelist of daring creativity and passion" by Edmund White. His short fiction has appeared in Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, The Louisville Review, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Indiana Review. He is also Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the MFA Program at Spalding University.

Editorial Reviews

Montreux, KY, a decaying urban slagheap, could not be more different from glamorous Montreux, Switzerland. After a PR campaign fails to revitalize the city, bipolar idealist Haycraft Keebler tries to rally people to create "a neighborly, self-sufficient community built on the feminine principles of tenderness and compassion." His base is the appropriately named Don Q Tavern, whose other habitu s include libertine anarchist Romeo Diaz, brutal policeman Chesley Sutherland, and an inhalant-huffing teenage male prostitute named Lambret who becomes Haycraft's special redemption project and lover. All serve as narrators, and although all are archetypes, they are real and compelling characters. Their many foibles and competing agendas and philosophies, however well intentioned, lead to disaster. Can one ordinary person change the world? Just when Gann, managing editor of Sarabande Books, seems to say "no," the coda, set a few years after these events, suggests that people can redeem themselves and maybe those closest to them, improving the world incrementally through individual love and a willingness to change. Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.-Jim Dwyer, California State Univ., Chico Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Second-novelist Gann (The Barbarian Parade, 2002) delves into the lives of eccentric and semi-lost regulars at a bar in a forsaken part of town. The city is Montreux (along the Ohio River, possibly), the once-thriving neighborhood is Old Towne, and the bar, windmill adorning it and alley out behind, is the Don Quixote. And things indeed have fallen far. We meet, for example, Haycraft Keebler, whose father was once the mayor, sufficiently successful, known and honored that his statue still stands in the city park. Haycraft, too, is a political idealist and worker, though his poverty, many oddities and his bipolar medical condition reduce him to the comedic Napoleon-in-rags of the title. Aging ex-hippies Beau and Glenda Stiles own and operate the establishment (its end will come at the close), looking after their flock (the tips jar is for Hay's rent) and sometimes being looked after in return (Haycraft shares his psycho meds with Glenda). The merit of Gann's story lies less in what's told than it does in the telling-a telling that, albeit sometimes slow, is rich, evocative and textured. As the characters' lives move toward their ends, so moves a whole era toward its end. Haycraft will fall in love with a young street hustler named Lambret Dellinger-with heartbreak the result. Romeo D'az will lose his lover, ex-ballet dancer Amanda, as she goes off to huge fame as a porn star. And Mather, the retarded boy whom Beau and Glenda have harbored for years, giving him a place to live in exchange for his cleaning up around the place, will die in a scene (though not Gann's best) of miscommunication and dumb violence. Readers may now and again need a certain patience to get there, but Haycraft's fateat story's end-and the conclusion generally-will reward them with closing fictional moments of the wonderful and significant. Impressive and ambitious work from a talent to watch closely.

Kirkus Reviews