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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."
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Saunders's (Pastoralia) idiosyncratic voice makes an almost perfect accompaniment to children's book illustrator Smith's (The Stinky Cheese Man) heightened characterizations and slightly surreal backdrops in this unconventional fairy tale for grownups. Saunders describes the setting, the town of Frip, as "three leaning shacks by the sea," which Smith represents as oblong two-story towers in brick red, ocean blue and mint green situated on irregular plots of land with sinewy trees against a yellow sky that suggest a Daliesque eerieness. The 1,500 gappers, spiky little creatures with multiple eyes, feed on the goats that graze the shacks' backyards; by habit, they split into three groups to attack all three properties at once. One day, the gappers decide that henceforth they will concentrate all their efforts on the goats at only one house, the one closest to the sea--inhabited by a girl, Capable, and her grieving, widowed father. Soon, the two unafflicted families begin to tell themselves that they are superior to Capable and her father ("Not that we're saying we're better than you, necessarily, it's just that, since gappers are bad, and since you and you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us"). Of course it's only a matter of time until everybody's luck changes. The Saunders-Smith collaboration is inspired. Smith adds witty touches throughout, and Saunders's dialogue features uncannily amusing deadpan repetitions and platitudinous self-exculpations. Saunders is much too hip to bring this fable to an edifying ending, but things do conclude as happily as is possible in the morally challenged, circumscribed world of Frip.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Life in Frip, while not necessarily pleasant or fun, was at least predictable. Every day, the gappers would inch out of the sea, attach themselves to goats (which they love), and begin to shriek happily. The goats (who don't love the gappers) would get thin and nervous, and stop giving milk. To save them (and the local economy), the children of Frip would remove the gappers and cast them back into the sea. And so it went, until the day that one gapper figured out that there was no need to split themselves among the three houses in the village. Instead, they could lavish all their affection on the goats of the house closest to the sea. This decision eventually leads to bad blood among neighbors, lots of money for the strong men from Fritch, a restructuring of the local economy, and a resolution to the gappers' sadly unrequited love. This delightful story is lavishly illustrated and the text and the pictures complement one another perfectly. It is a parable of sorts, and one could probably even find a hint of a moral. It is also a wickedly funny, entertaining, and engaging read. Oh, and if at this point you are wondering what a gapper is, close your eyes and picture a bright orange burr about the size of a baseball, with many eyes and one mouth, with which to shriek happily.-Susan Salpini, Purcellville Library, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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
