Footsucker - Hardcover

Nicholson, Geoff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879516801 ISBN 13: 9780879516802

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 1996

Synopsis

Geoff Nicholson, the reigning master of obsessive black literary humor, brings us his riskiest novel yet, delving into the erotic world of a foot fetishist. Nicholson's unnamed narrator is a serious man with a full life. He reads newspapers, follows polit

About this title

About the Author:

Geoff Nicholson is the author of twenty books, including Sex Collectors, Hunters and Gatherers, The Food Chain, and Bleeding London, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.

From Publishers Weekly:

A narrator whose outre sexual habits are as meticulously chronicled as an episode in Kraft-Ebbing's Pyschopathia Sexualis proves to be both a richly mined satirical vein and a hindrance in this ingenious, offbeat romantic fable from Nicholson (Still Life with Volkswagons), a British novelist whose U.S. reputation is on the rise. The unnamed hero is a foot fetishist, albeit a decidedly likable, well-groomed type, given to standing on London streets and posing as a fashion-industry PR consultant to ask women intimate questions about their feet. When Catherine, a statuesque, American sexual adventuress wearing "spike-heeled, zebra-skin shoes," invites him home for a night of wild, fetishistic sex, he thinks his prayers have been answered. Her feet are "a wonder of nature" and they happen to fit, Cinderella-like, a pair of especially exotic shoes the narrator spies one day in a shop window belonging to Harold Wilmer, a morose artisan of baroque footware who agrees to make a series of special shoes for Catherine and the narrator to incorporate into their sex life. Interspersed throughout are large doses of foot trivia and digressive accounts of the narrator's obsessions, from stealing women's shoes to compiling an enormous archive of scrapbooks, videos and some particularly outrageous FM's ("fuck-me shoes"). But just when the novel threatens to become little more than an archive unto itself, things turn around. Catherine gets cold feet and dumps the narrator, who learns that she is involved with a suspicious photographer named Kramer, who appears to be kinkier even than he is. When Kramer is mysteriously murdered and Catherine disappears, a particulary sinister police detective enters his life and confiscates his archive. It's not Nicholson's most ambitious book, but those who aren't too grossed out will enjoy this fiendish satire of a culture obsessed with sex, power and kinky apparel. First serial to Grand Street.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0879516801
• ISBN 13: 9780879516802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224