Boom!

New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1965. First Edition. Hardcover. [spine slightly turned, only a little shelfwear, but peeking beneath the dust jacket reveals some rather severe fading along the edges of the paper-covered boards (my suggestion: don't peek); the jacket has some shallow chipping along the top edge, and the spine lettering is just a bit color-shifted, but is otherwise clean and attractive]. A picaresque novel about a young German immigrant who comes to America to fulfill his dream of "accumulating fame, fortune, and his fair share of power." To that end, he makes his way across the country, getting involved in various schemes along the way, from gambling-insurance vending machines in Reno, to founding a Zen monastery and sanitarium in Riverside, California, to promoting a line of fortune cookies stuffed with Bible verses (and, later, leftist political slogans). The blurb writers try valiantly to place the book "in the fashionable modern vein of surrealistic satire made popular by Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, and J.P. Donleavy," but the author's writing career seems to have gone directly to Nowheresville. (This was his only published book; presumably he kept his day job, as an art instructor at Sonoma (California) State College.) .