Mumford

Place New York. Time: the present deeply submerged in a medley of past events.

Mumford is in a cell, in a high security psychiatric hospital, allowed no contact with the outside world except an old typewriter, more precisely  a 1917 Underwood No 4 a but no access to a computer or the outside world in any shape or form. So in total isolation, apart from two prison guards, known as kryptkeepers one and two, he begins his tale that takes us all over New York and deep into Mumford’s strange mind. . A narcissistic and totally unreliable narrator, he is determined to mount a defence against a variety of crimes of which he stands accused. Not that he isn’t guilty, but he’s confident he can justify every infraction if given enough paper, and an adequate supply of Wite-Out.

When the depressive Sarita plunges to her death before handing over a brilliant manuscript to her writing workshop, Mumford escapes with the document and claims it as his own. He proceeds to dispense with anyone whom he suspects knows the truth. This obsession triggers a spiral of stratagems and subterfuge often interrupted by rationalizations, personal anecdotes, and anything else Mumford deems relevant to his case: such as the current location of Albert Einstein’s eyes, and whether the word ‘onomatopoeia’ tastes like banana pudding in the moonlight. The novel is the offspring of Jean Korelitz’s THE PLOT and Julie Schumacher’s DEAR COMMITTEE MEMBERS by way of TRISTAM SHANDY.