Blue Pastoral — Gilbert Sorrentino

"I see him now! Somewhere out there in that gloaming that we call the Past that Time forgot--his ratty beard and frizzy hair, his hearty grease sandwiches, his rusted bicycle clips. An unlikely hero, your good faces seem to say..."

And so we meet our hero Serge "Blue" Gavotte, a modern-day Candide who quits his job, mounts a piano atop a broken-down pushcart and sets off with wife and child on a visionary quest across contemporary America in search of the "Perfect Musical Phrase." From the dismal plains of the Midwest to the technicolor sunsets of the Southwest, Blue refuses to let financial troubles, lecherous professors or the burdensome weight of his piano prevent him from reaching his final goal.

A work of art masquerading as artifice, "Blue Pastoral" is a madhouse production whose hilarious cast of styles and forms includes everything from Rabelaisian lists to Swiftian satires to parodies of such pastoral modes as the eclogue, the idyll, and the elegy.