A
revolution is under way at a once sleepy New England bank.
Forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons has gone from sweet-tempered
loan officer to insatiable force of nature almost overnight. Suddenly
she’s brazenly seducing the high-school drum major, taking over her
boss’s office, firing anyone who crosses her, inspiring populist fervor,
and publicly announcing plans to crush her local rivals en route to
dominating the entire banking industry in the northeast. The terrifying
new order instituted by Frankie and her offbeat goon squad (led by her
devoted hairdresser and including her own son-in-law) is an awesome
spectacle to behold.
“Ride
a Cockhorse is at once high comedy and a mordant account of the
paranoid personality, but this is only part of the elaborate business
that Kennedy has undertaken; he has also brought off the improbable if
not impossible—a novel about a bank! The best comic novel to come my way
in a long time.”
Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“Perhaps the funniest American novel since John Kennedy Toole’s prize winner, A Confederacy of Dunces.”
Newsweek
Raymond
Kennedy (1934–2008) was born and raised in western Massachusetts. In
1982, he joined the creative writing faculty at Columbia University,
where he taught until his retirement in 2006. Kennedy’s other novels
include My Father’s Orchard; Goodnight, Jupiter; Columbine; The Flower of the Republic; Lulu Incognito; The Bitterest Age; and The Romance of Eleanor Gray.
Katherine A. Powers’s column on books and writers ran for many years in The Boston Globe and now appears in The Barnes & Noble Review under the title “A Reading Life.” She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life—The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963, forthcoming in 2013.
David Gordon is a prize-winning journalist (Newsweek, Harvard Education Letter) and book editor (Harvard Education Press), and is now communications director for an education nonprofit. In 1991, when Ride a Cockhorse was first published, Gordon was Raymond Kennedy's writing student at Columbia University. They became friends, and Kennedy dedicated his final book, The Romance of Eleanor Gray, to him.
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