Winkie
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A teddy bear is arrested for terrorism in “this surprisingly effective allegory of our terror-stricken times . . . a funny and sweet yet seriously topical novel” (Kirkus, starred review).
In Cliff Chase’s scathingly funny debut novel, a mild-mannered teddy bear named Winkie comes to life—only to find himself on the wrong side of America’s war on terror. After suffering decades of neglect from the children who once loved him, Winkie decides to take charge of his fate by hurling himself off the shelf, jumping out the window, and heading to the forest. But just as he discovers the joys of mobility, self-determination, and even true love, this small brown creature of indeterminate gender gets trapped in the jaws of a society gone rabid with fear and paranoia.
Having come upon the cabin of the mad professor who stole his beloved, Winkie is suddenly surrounded by the FBI, who instantly conclude that he is the evil mastermind behind dozens of terrorist attacks. Terrified and confused, Winkie is brought to trial, where the prosecution attempts to seal the little bear’s fate by calling upon witnesses from the trials of Galileo, Socrates, John Scopes, and Oscar Wilde.
Winkie introduces the most memorable protagonist since the Velveteen Rabbit, and—with the help of a lesbian Muslim cleaning woman, a stuttering attorney, and a Lacan-spewing bear cub—exposes the cruel absurdities of our age while exploring what it means to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut novel from memoirist Chase (The Hurry-up Song) begins with the capture and wounding by a SWAT team of the eponymous, sentient teddy bear in a backwoods cabin; the team thinks it has captured a mad bomber. In jail, Winkie, who no one denies is a teddy bear, must contend with cruel jailers; his stuttering, court-appointed lawyer named Unwin; the 9,678 counts of everything from treason to witchcraft he's charged with; and the intersection of his life with that of the previous possessor of the cabin, an old humanities professor whose bombs never worked. While marking time, Winkie contemplates his past: his ownership by the Chase family, his loneliness when on a shelf , his magical awakening to life one morning marked by a bowel movement so lovingly described that it recalls Bloom's in Ulysses. The sections devoted to Winkie's trial is a minor masterpiece of ridiculousness, in which the prosecution's move to end the trial after it has presented its side sounds uncomfortably close to what we read in the newspapers. This book is way too odd to be sentimental, and its political sensibility shuttles easily between the cartoonish and the shrewd. Chase puts himself in the same league as David Sedaris with this unclassifiable debut.
