Alas, poor Harvey, I knew him. Shortly after Killoyle came out in
'97 I was on the road from Texas to Washington, D.C., to promote the book
at various bookstores in the nation's capital and nearby Virginia, and
had stopped on my first night at the Super 8 Motel in Hope,
Arkansas. After a sumptuous fried-chicken takeout from the local KFC,
just down the street from Bill Clinton's childhood home, I was lying on
my bed watching par-per-view when the phone rang and a raspy voice
mispronounced my name, inquiringly: I thought it was a crank call, and
it was, only the crank was Harvey Pekar, who was reviewing Killoyle
for some lefty-alternative rag and wanted to know what my bona fides
were for writing an experimental Irish novel. I stammered a reply, but
he wasn't really interested in what I had to say, being mostly
concerned with establishing to his satisfaction that I wasn't a phony
and a poseur like that guy Pynchon. We, or rather he, talked for about
an hour, then he abruptly said, "Thanks, bye," and hung up. In the end
he wrote a generous and highly idiosyncratic review that I still have, here.
There's more on Harvey from fellow-Clevelanders here,
and my pal Jim Hynes wrote an excellent review of Pekar's famous set-to
with David Letterman, here.
He was like a secondary character from a Dostoevsky novel, embittered
and mordantly humorous, and cynical only to the extent that he was a frustrated
romantic. RIP, Harvey.
