Roger Fishbite

Lucky Linderhof is a 12-year-old latter-day Lolita, born of the privileged sperm club, living in New York with her affectionate but ineffectual mother who changes her lovers as quickly as she changes her designer clothes. Abandoned by her father, Lucky seeks a symbolic replacement from amongst her mother's boyfriends. When the piranha lodger Roger Fishbite moves in, the ironically named Lucky Lady ends up with a father-figure who becomes a lover.

Funny and surreal, Roger Fishbite has the stylistic atmosphere of Angela Carter in Disneyland for the millennium. The novel develops into a satirical, nightmarish adventure and, along the way, a hilarious parody of American consumerism from a child's point of view. As Fishbite drags Lucky from one seamy motel to another, her prepubescent sexual fantasies give way to the brittle survival instincts of the abused child. Emily Prager has modernised Nabokov's original by giving her child-heroine a voice:

"Was I in love with Fishbite? Sometimes, when the light hit his shoulder blade in a certain way, or he made a game of chasing me down one of the empty corridors or at a mall when he was paying at the register, I could forget the iniquity and a wave of warmth would rush over me and I'd have to kiss him ... But that was apart from the sex, you see, which was in a box somewhere off by itself."

Lucky is as sassy as "Fishy" is disgusting and her final revenge is a discordant symphony of mayhem and murder. Her story, "the real pain of moral children forced to live under morally indifferent grown-ups." --Rachel Holmes


Genre: General Fiction