Book Synopsis
In the mid-1970s the hero of The Jolly Place, fresh out of university and drawing upon the only marketable skill he ever contrived to acquire during those salad days, takes his first faltering steps into adulthood as he moves to San Francisco from a cloistered college town. Landing among the city’s Russian émigré community, both White and Red, he tiptoes through a cast of eccentrics, including a genially alcoholic Cossack landlady, an Aspergerish roommate and unlikely Lothario, a near-feral puppy, and the vividly-limned staff and management of World O. Pancakes, the eponymous “Jolly Place,” with its smarmy supervisor, sadistic short-order cook, slatternly waitresses and suicidal, seldom-glimpsed night-shift dishwasher. Professional, pulmonary and romantic challenges are variously confronted, endured and surmounted in part by means of an elaborate series of Mittyesque interior monologues. Rob Wittig’s debut novel remains evergreen.