Famous Potatoes

Joe Cottonwood's "Famous Potatoes" is an "on-the-road" story uneasily weded to mystical elements more at home in a Richard Brautigan novel. Vietnam vet Willy Middlebrook is framed for a murder he didn't commit and becomes a fugitive forced to explore the bright and dark sides of human nature in the seedier parts of America's cities. Middlebrook sinks into the faceless society that America has become. Middlebrook efforts to escape the authorities reveals the kindness of those who aid him and the ugliness of those who thwart him or just view him indifferently. This would have been a good novel reflecting the anger and frustration of the post-war 1970s, but Cottonwood disrupts the flow at times with ghostly encounters that muddy the narrative. Even taking that shortcoming into consideration, this book will make you think. Cottonwood has a gift for story telling and for capturing America's mood in the early 1970s.