I Love You, Mary Fatt

New York: Signet Books (D2058). Very Good. 1962 (c.1961). 1st printing. Softcover. [moderate soft creasing in front cover, a little wear to extremities, spine tight and uncreased]. Mass Market PB First-person narrative by a lovestruck adolescent, one Clarence Bascomb, likened in the cover blurbs to Holden Caulfield and Booth Tarkington's Penrod. There's something about this book that I can't quite put my finger on, e.g.: although the narrator and all the primary characters are white, the cover illustrator seems to have somehow had the idea that Clarence was African-American. There's also an odd scene, about halfway through the book, in which our hero, telling his mother about his supposed girlfriend, invents a fake name for her on the spot, "Reeola Bones," which in turn prompts his mother to ask, slightly insistently: "She's not a Negro by any chance?" That brief and weird little episode seems to just come out of nowhere, and as far as I can see (not having read the entire thing) there are no actual black characters anywhere in the book, or in the unnamed town where the action takes place -- so where is this lady's sudden race-based anxiety coming from? Also: the book is scarce enough, in any printing, that it hints at the possibility of its having a cult following -- yet I can find out nothing biographical about the author at all. .