I
stumbled across some happy news yesterday: Don
Carpenter’s Fridays At Enrico’s is
slated for publication, this April.
Carpenter has cult-lit status: a talented
chap who, in the 1950s, dove deep into the West Coast Beat-Hippy-Hollywood scene, and worked as hard as
he partied. His oeuvre retains considerable cache, not just with Boomers Who
Remember, but with schmoes-gone-pro (like Richard
Price and George Pelecanos) as
well as the current Hipsterati.
In
the decade that followed his suicide, the manuscript for Fridays acquired the status of Holy Grail—Carpenter’s final work, a
novel akin to de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins,
where the changing of famous names only adds to the piquancy of the drama.
Carpenter’s executor and surviving family members assured the public it
definitely existed, albeit in an admittedly rough and probably unpublishable
format.
Fans of A Hard Rain Falling and
A Couple Of Comedians would have
jumped at a POD photocopy, but now we have something better: the finished
product, with an afterword by West Coaster Jonathan
Lethem. Looks like I’ve got two months to clear a coveted spot on the
bedside table.
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