EDITORS' CHOICE

Robert Gover, On the Run with Dick and Jane. Titusville, New Jersey: Hopewell Publications, 2006.

In 2005, a small New Jersey press, Hopewell Publications, did the literary world the service of resurrecting Robert Gover’s cult classic, then only in print in a typo-riddled edition, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. The book was a phenomenal best-seller from the 1960s, a comic divesting of the hypocrisy of American racism and was widely praised (see “A Conversation with Robert Gover” on page 21). Since then, Gover has published a number of novels and nonfiction books on topics as varied as voodoo and world economics.

What Hopewell also did, however, was to discover that Gover had a fifteen-year-old novel in the drawer which he had concluded was not going to be published in the PC US of the time. In an editorial note at the front of the book, the Hopewell editor says, “Gover writes with prophetic insight about characters involved in the burgeoning American health care crisis, child abandonment, and the child sex slavery trade that moves silently over borders throughout the world. . . . (T)his book (is) more relevant now than ever.” On the Run with Dick and Jane, which Gover conceived and wrote long before the more recent Jim Carey film, which also borrows names from the vintage grade school reader, does not take long to hook you and keep you turning its 254 pages of lightly comic prose. The comic surface conceals the emotional hurt beneath Jane’s smart-mouth cool. The novel is a road story and a kind of Lolita in reverse, where Dick, a 63-year-old childcare worker, is held hostage in his own van by a 12-year-old stowaway.

Dick is on the way cross-country from North Carolina to California, grieving the death of his wife, to meet his sons where they will scatter her ashes, traveling with him in an urn. On the outskirts of Houston, Dick hears scratching noises and discovers he is not alone. His stowaway is Jane, a 12-year-old on the lam from Grandmother’s Home, by which Dick previously was employed as a social worker. While he sleeps, Jane slips into his bed and catches him by surprise; against his will, she triggers a response, but the child is startled that her “reward” is not lust, but anger. A normal, decent human being, unlike many of the other characters in this novel, Dick is not sexually interested in children. Nor does he wish to be burdened by her, but she keeps him in check with the threat of yelling rape.

In the course of their run across the continent, while Dick tries to find a place where he in good conscience can deposit the child, they run into an array of unsavory characters, each absorbed in his or her own particular narcissism—from self-serving aunts to helpful truck-drivers who, once they have Jane alone, do not hesitate to brutally help themselves to her body.

During the course of their journey, some unsavory facts of American institutional life are revealed, but finally the force of basic human decency begins to take the upper hand as Dick and Jane come to terms with one another as adult and child.

The title clearly is chosen as an ironic twist on the simple, sunny, smiling world of the grade school reader about Dick and Jane and their puppy. The world of this Dick and Jane is one where children are unscrupulously and routinely abused. But also one in which, Gover suggests, the vicious cycle can be broken—damaged children are not mere victims to be written off as lost losers; they are individuals whose hearts and souls contain our future. Dick Steel and Jane Doyle are well-drawn, memorable characters, and their journey together is one that happily defies the popular cynicism of the day.

Gore Vidal has hailed this novel as “A literary Halley’s comet . . . ” And like that comet, it is not likely to be forgotten by those who experience it.

Thomas E. Kennedy