Fallen Idol of Tabloid Miracles

Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose (Pantheon Books: $16.95)

For about 100 pages, Vera Perl’s job sounds like a journalist’s fantasy. She never has to cite a source, check a fact or cool her heels in hotel lobbies while prima donnas phone their agents. Her stories for This Week are lies; though neither entirely pure nor particularly simple. Novelists enjoy some of this same freedom, but novelists get reviewed. Vera doesn’t have to worry about the critics. She writes what she pleases, the more outrageous, the better.

If her work isn’t likely to be mentioned when the Pulitzers are handed out, This Week’s circulation is huge, the pay scale comparable to newspapers of record, and the responsibilities significantly lighter. While Vera has no cause to be discontented, there are times when she longs to be investigating Russian emigre life in Brighton Beach, exposing Medicare scandals or following pompous politicians through shopping malls. Whenever these wistful feelings threaten her tranquillity, she has only to formulate her next headline to cheer herself up.

So what if This Week isn’t read in the Oval Office or at 10 Downing Street? How many people live there anyway? Vera Perl is queen of the checkout counter, laureate of the express line. The world is a colossal oyster in which her stories grow ever more baroque.

Favorite Subjects

Bigfoot, the legendary anthropoid monster who obligingly leaves manhole-sized footprints in the western boondocks, is one of her favorite subjects, though lately she’s been overusing him. The magazine’s overarching imagery, “the theme that underlines and transforms every word, is the suffering of the innocent, deception and betrayal by everyone from Henry Kissinger to Circuit Court judges, doctors, husbands, wives, parents, best friends.” Vera’s story ideas come from folk legend, conversations overheard on the subway, graffiti, drop heads in the Metro section. “On good days she likes to think of herself as a kind of screamer spokeswoman, bearing their messages to the world.” After earning her status with “Demento Dentist Plants CB Radios in Malpractice Molars,” she’s been surpassing herself ever since.

As the sole support of a precocious 10-year-old daughter Rosie, fathered by her footloose hippie ex-husband Lowell, Vera cannot afford the luxury of the examined life. Her father, a lovable but unregenerate 1930s radical, might be prouder if she wrote about survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; her mother would be content if she’d remarry, but neither of them is in any position to press the points. Vera lives in a permanent meantime; a clever, streetwise single mother, comforted by her colleague and occasional lover Solomon, a photographer on the magazine staff; sustained by her old friend Louise, whose life is even more unsettled, and kept on a more or less even keel by Rosie, her adorable but contentious child.

Lowell is in Los Angeles, writing no-hope screenplays and living by his wits. He’s endearing too; the ultimate Luftmensch , dreaming of sunken treasure galleons, fountains of youth, winning the Tri-State Lottery. Set adrift when his counterculture friends bought T-bills and condos, Lowell has resisted upward mobility so successfully that he’s still sleeping on other people’s sofas. Though Vera loves him, she realizes he’ll never be husband material despite his remarkable talent for fatherhood.

Her Finest Fiction

Inspired by a photo Solomon shows her of two children selling lemonade in front of a restored Victorian house, Vera turns her antic imagination loose and comes up with one of her finest fictions yet--”Fountain of Youth Flows in Brooklyn Backyard”; personalizing her story with a mommie Stephanie Green, a cardiologist daddy Martin Green and two darling tykes named Joshua and Megan. Elaborating, she fantasizes that something in the Green’s Flatbush water is invigorating all buyers, turning ordinary lemonade mix into a panacea for chronic diseases, a restorer of lost hair, an elixir to melt away ugly fat; the standard tabloid miracles. This time Vera doesn’t get home free. There actually is a family named Green in that Victorian house, and their lives become a living hell when This Week hits the stands.

At this point prose gives in to serious meditations on coincidence, synchronicity, ESP and related matters, all of which tend to dissipate the hilarious mood sustained until then in “Bigfoot Dreams.” Suddenly we’re out of the funhouse world of sleazy journalism and into a tangled web of complex relationships, pathetic compromises, and the difficulties of learning to live in a world one never made. After this short detour, the satiric tone is restored, and the author’s intent achieved. Prose has the last word on life imitating art and vice versa, a theme to challenge the investigative reporters and the ablest novelists around.