Frederic Tuten’s new fiction is precisely what Flann O’Brien said that the modern novel should be: a self-evident sham. Everything about the physical book, from the clear plastic jacket to the original Roy Lichtenstein frontispiece to the breathless blurbs, bespeaks its status as authentic bogus, the very imago of New York postmodernism: unassailably chic and incoherently hip.
Though the name Tuten looks like the triliteral root that engendered the character Tintin, the eponym is in fact the work of another man’s imagination. The Belgian Georges Remi (1907–83), who built his nom de plume Hergé on his reversed initials, R.G., was one of the greatest of comic-strip artists.
Though I am almost exactly the same age as Tintin, he did not form a part of my early pantheon of Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Alley Oop, et al. My Belgian wife soon clued me in, however, and my children grew up with the sort of intimate knowledge of all Tintin’s adventures that is today taken for granted, when no child’s library is complete without every single one of the some twenty-three albums that compose, along with the still accumulating full edition of “Krazy Kat,” one of the very few truly sacred canons of the comic strip.
Jay Cantor’s wonderfully appealing novel Krazy Kat(1988) appeared while Tuten’s romance was gestating with the help of a Guggenheim grant. Neither book is a novelization, to be sure, but Cantor’s is a meditation on the actual world of George Herriman, a