Ride a Cockhorse

A revolution is underway at the once sleepy New England bank where forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons, newly endowed with a gift for persuasive speech and a dramatically quickened libido, has gone from sweet-tempered loan officer to insatiable force of nature almost overnight. Suddenly she's brazenly seducing the high school drum major, taking over her boss's office, firing anyone who crosses her, inspiring populist fervor, and publicly announcing plans to crush her local rivals en route to dominating the entire Northeast banking industry. The explosive reign of terror instituted by Frances and her offbeat goon squad (led by her devoted hairdresser and including her own son-in-law), diabolically comic and frighteningly plausible, brimming with snappy dialogue and gleeful obscenity, is an awesome spectacle to behold. A master stylist, Raymond Kennedy has created in Ride a Cockhorsea rollicking cautionary tale of small-town demagoguery that might be seen to prefigure both America's current financial woes and the rise of the likes of Sarah Palin. Frances is in any case a beautiful monster of an antihero-resist her at your peril!

Raymond Kennedy (1934–2008) was born and raised in western Massachusetts. In 1982, he joined the creative writing faculty at Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 2006.  Kennedy’s other novels include My Father’s Orchard; Goodnight, Jupiter; Columbine; The Flower of the Republic; Lulu Incognito; The Bitterest Age; and The Romance of Eleanor Gray.

Katherine A. Powers’s column on books and writers ran for many years in The Boston Globe and now appears in The Barnes & Noble Review under the title “A Reading Life.” She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life—The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963, forthcoming in 2013.