Golk (Phoenix Fiction)

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Both novels are about what is real, both in art and in relationships, and both get into manufacturing reality through the latest media. Golk manipulates the high and mighty, the lowdown and dirty, and the outrageous weird; all are within the compass of Richard Stern in this early novel, a comedy with as many inspired maneuvers as its rambunctious protagonist has for taking the measure of a profligate world. After executing a few of these larger golks, which result in lawsuits and reduced ratings, Golk is gently ousted from his role as the show’s lead, and Hondorp and Hendricks happily take the reins in his place. He is drawn to Elaine Hendricks, a mid-20-ish divorcee who comes from money, and whose peripatetic past included a wealthy and abusive husband.

They salute one another from afar, but Hondorp is quickly back on his way to Chicago, certain that he will never aspire to anything again. By bidding on, or purchasing this item, you are agreeing to us sharing your name and address details with that 3rd party supplier to allow us to fulfil our contractual obligations to you. Television has little to do initially with the portrait that Stern paints of his central protagonist, the 38-year-old perpetual student Hondorp, whose life at the novel’s start consists only of roaming the streets of New York, observing, mingling with people, passing time till he can go home to his father’s apartment in Manhattan—where, after dinner, he reads, and his father languishes in front of the tv till he sleeps—and then begin again his aimless routine all over the next day. Like a window into their day-to-day life, Golk census records can tell you where and how your ancestors worked, their level of education, veteran status, and more.Biography: Richard Stern, professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of many works of fiction, including Other Men's Daughters, Natural Shocks, and the recent, much-acclaimed A Father's Words. It left me puzzled because I kept believing that there was something about the nature of television’s intrusiveness and ubiquity as entertainment that was essential to the story, that the satire was deeper and more profound, pointing to some major shift in contemporary society.

I’m not certain that Stern was working out this formulation about the numbing and deadening qualities of too-pervasive television and the false intimacy of celebrity, but it seems to pertain.In midcentury America, one man is determined to take over the airwaves with a program as audacious as it is entertaining. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. People were willing to become golks, for it was an entrée into celebrity, an exalted realm above the activities of the mere scrabblers in life. Fingering the battered cover and flipping through the yellowed pages inside, eventually the cashier saw my point and I purchased it for a mere two bucks. I took it to the counter along with my other unloved discoveries and the cashier was momentarily flummoxed over what to charge me.