Clark Gifford's Body

Back in Print After Fifty Years


Clark Gifford? A cipher. A disaffected, vaguely idealistic politician in a nameless media-driven modern state where representative politics has dwindled to the corrupt transaction of business as usual and a new foreign war is always breaking out. One night Gifford and his followers seize some radio stations and broadcast a call for freedom—a rebellion that is immediately put down by the government and whose motive will remain forever obscure. Even so, it leads to twenty years of war.

A paranoid tour de force of political noir, Clark Gifford’s Body skips back and forth in time, interspersing newspaper clippings and court transcripts with the reactions and reminiscences of the politicians, generals, businessmen, journalists, waiters, and soldiers who double as the actors and the chorus in a drama over which, finally, they have no control. Who here is leading? Who is being led? Fearing’s novel is a pseudo-documentary of a world given over to pseudo-politics and pseudo-events, a prophetic glimpse of the future as a poisonous fog.

“I have not developed the habit of reading thrillers, but I have read enough of them to know that from now on Mr. Fearing is my man.”–The New YorkerPraise for Kenneth Fearing:

“I have not developed the habit of reading thrillers, but I have read enough of them to know that from now on Mr. Fearing is my man.”–The New Yorker

“There are plenty of people currently writing variations on Fearing (possibly without being aware of it), but it’s tough to beat the stylish chill of the original.”–Poetry Magazine
KENNETH FEARING (1902-1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Voted wittiest boy and class pessimist in high school, he moved to New York City after graduating the University of Wisconsin. He published several well received volumes of poetry in addition to his novels, including Angel Arms, Dead Reckoning, and Stranger at Coney Island and other poems.

ROBERT POLITO is the author of Doubles, A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. He edited the Library of America volumes, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, and directs the Graduate Writing Program at The New School. He lives in New York.