Pike’s Folly

Hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “a fearsome cultural critic disguised in novelist’s clothing,” Mike Heppner now offers a hilarious, scathing, and ultimately endearing account of a multigenerational search for the fully, perhaps overly, examined life and the pandemonium that ensues.

Nathaniel Pike—a self-proclaimed Emersonian and self-aggrandizing gazillionaire infamous for developing costly projects utterly devoid of purpose—is purchasing a parcel of federal wilderness in New Hampshire with the intention of paving it over. While his assistant uses Pike as a cash machine, an excuse for writer’s block, and a distraction from his wife’s budding exhibitionist career, the Interior Department bureaucrat brokering the land hopes to pocket Pike’s money but skirt the scandal promised him by various activists. Meanwhile, Rhode Island’s other gazillionaire enlists Pike to help shore up his faltering philanthropies, an overture that enrages his daughter but delights her boyfriend, to whom Pike is a heroic pioneer of transgressive cinema and, incredibly, a friend of his hero, Brian Wilson.

In this round-robin of folly, Heppner turns a merciless eye on cultural malfeasances from the digital avant-garde to disingenuous tax reform—even as the participants in Pike’s Folly gradually capture our sympathy, caught as they are in a richly comic and humane version of this hugely imperfect world.