Fup

My sister introduced me to Fup years ago. I’ve been talking it up ever since.

A tall tale; a fable; a story of love and affection; an effervescent celebration of unconventional life—Jim Dodge’s novel roves from unsparing grief to wry observation to uproarious laughter to fierce joy to quiet reconciliation with final reckonings.

Set in Calaveras County, California, the book gets its title from Fup, a duck, who becomes the close companion of Tiny, an orphan raised by his grandfather Jake. Tiny is on a quixotic quest to build fences that no one needs. His nemesis, Lockjaw, a fierce and vindictive wild pig, uproots his carefully-set fences. Tiny finds Fup at the bottom of a posthole savaged by Lockjaw, rescues her, and brings her into the curious masculine fellowship of his household. Fup is a story of oddball characters, human and animal.

Fup is also a story of love, loss, loneliness and despair. By the second page, we have met a pregnant seventeen-year-old, Gabriel Santee, married and then widowed two months before the birth of her son, Jonathan. By the fourth, we have mourned her death, nine days before Jonathan’s third birthday. And we learn that Jonathan—or Tiny—will be raised by his grandfather Jake.

Jake is a cantankerous, hard-drinking, footloose gold prospector. His life is a voyage of discovery, of ruinous gambling and happy accident—and the recognition that a person’s happiness is once in a while the consequence of another’s misfortune.

One such consequence: a recipe for whiskey, which Jake then distills himself:

The whiskey helped him keep still. One hit of Ol’ Death Whisper would drive most humans to their knees; two produced a mildly hallucinatory catatonia. The recipe produced a distillate that Jake figured was close to 97 percent pure, the condensed essence of divine vapors.

Jake’s amorous life has the same double quality of great expectation and swift disappointment:

His fourth marriage lasted one day. Polly was a San Francisco librarian. The practicality he admired in her, and which he thought might temper his recklessness, unfortunately carried into the bridal chamber. When she opened a book and began to read, Jake settled with her in cash on the spot. He won some of it back playing poker in the waterfront saloons, but then his luck turned cold.

Fup is a celebration of oddballs: Jake himself, of course, but also Tiny. It is a paean to the kind of place and time that allows the offbeat to survive; it’s a reminder of the fragility of tolerance and understanding.

Fortunately for Jake, it was the kind of community that has almost been lost in American life, one where the neighbors are respectful and friendly, and where—as long as you are just difficult and not dangerous—people mind their own business. Jake, of course, didn’t think of himself as crazy, or even vaguely abnormal; like anyone who lets the mind wander long and far enough, it occasionally got lost. Jake, increasingly convinced of his blooming immortality, was in no hurry to find it.

Dodge doesn’t reconcile the conflicting elements of the human condition; he suggests that they generate each other. Tragedy begets love. From death, sometimes, comes life. From small books, sometimes, comes immense satisfaction.