The Bear Went Over the Mountain

"Kotzwinkle's sprawling body of work includes the psychedelic cult novel The Fan Man (1974), the novelization of ET: The Extraterrestrial (1982), and the award-winning animal-uprising fantasy Dr. Rat (1976). If anyone is qualified to write a satire of the book racket featuring a famous author who is also a bear, it's Kotzwinkle. As the book opens, we meet University of Maine professor Arthur Bramhall, who has spent his sabbatical in the country writing Destiny and Desire, a moving rural love story with lots of fishing and sex. Having lost one typewritten draft to a fire, he cautiously hides his latest version under a low-hanging tree. Unfortunately for Art, the briefcase containing his manuscript is found by a foraging bear, who can read well enough to know that he's got a hit on his hands. Having acquired a suit, a New York agent, and the nom de plume Hal Jam, he takes the publishing world by storm. His clumsy utterances act as a sort of conversational inkblot test, and much like Chauncey Gardiner's power in Being There, everyone hears what they need to hear. No one notices that Hal is a bear, but he does get compared to Hemingway a lot. Meanwhile, back in Maine, Art is exhibiting some distinctly ursine behavior. Within the framework of the tried-and-true 'switch' plot, Kotzwinkle tweaks publicists, academics, politicians, and anyone else he can think of and wraps up the whole uproarious package with an ending that is both surprising and inevitable."—Booklist

"In rural Maine a common black bear discovers an unpublished novel, reads it, decides it's a good effort, and leaves his wilderness home for New York, where he presents the novel as his own and takes the world by storm. His observations of the ironies and inconsistencies of the human world are both funny and pointed in Kotzwinkle's parody."—Midwest Book Review

"The funniest fable of our time."—Los Angeles Times