Daisy Buchanan's Daughter — Tom Carson

She was born during the Jazz Age and grew up in Paris and the American Midwest after her father's death on the polo field and her mother's later suicide. As a young war reporter, she waded ashore on Omaha Beach and witnessed the liberation of Dachau. She spent the 1950s hobnobbing in Hollywood with Marlene Dietrich and Gene Kelly. She went to West Africa as an Ambassador's wife as Jack Kennedy's Camelot dawned. She comforted a distraught LBJ in Washington, DC, as the Vietnam war turned into a quagmire. And today? Today, it's June 6, 2006: Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller's 86th birthday. With some asperity, she's waiting for a congratulatory phone call from the President of the United States. Brother, is he ever going to get a piece of her mind.
"Who could have predicted the daughter of Tom and Daisy Buchanan would find herself, at the age of 86, a crotchety, irreverent, foul-mouthed blogger living in Washington, DC, nursing an obsession for Kirstin Dunst? Or that her life would intersect, scandalously, with Lyndon Baines Johnson? Or that Nick Carraway would find religion? By the time you finish reading this trippy, hilarious, brilliant meta-memoir of a novel, you may need a refresher in 20th Century history to parse fact from fiction." Susan Coll, author of Beach Week, Acceptance and Rockville Pike
There beyond the groves of West Egg, in a secret corner of Gatsby s mansion, is an unmarked door onto the loony American century of this dazzling novel. Once again Tom Carson commits an extravagant act of imagination -- magnificently written, and as seditious and blindingly smart as it is irresistible and laugh-out-loud fun. Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Our Ecstatic Days
" 'Daisy Buchanan's Daughter' is an acute, hilarious and moving vision of the 20th century as refracted through two unique sensibilities: that of its indefatigable narrator, and that of the supremely witty, deeply wise, and endlessly playful writer who dreamed her up." --Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies/Some Came Running
Take a skippy, dizzy, dazzling joyride with a chick who cracks the East and West Eggs wide open. The old lady holding the gun and the keyboard may be Daisy Buchanan s daughter, but she s the stylish stepchild of Nabokov, blogging about what happened after Fitzgerald set down his pen. Her own wild adventures literary, sexual, historical anticipate a fateful phone call from one of the great villains of recent years. Pammie is the dame-iest of dames, and this is the rompiest of reads. Huzzah! Susann Cokal, author of Mirabilis and Breath and Bones
"In this inventive and masterful novel, Tom Carson takes us inside the privileged post-Gatsby world of the iconic Buchanans, bringing to bear his exquisite and confident imagination as he presents the world of Daisy Buchanan's daughter--a world no less fraught and socially dangerous than the one in which Fitzgerald s characters roamed. Carson's skill with multiple voices brilliantly illuminates the kaleidoscopic sense of identity one invariably finds in a brittle milieu. The reader will be captivated." Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger's Glasses and A Brief History of Camouflage
"She is the first great literary character of the new millennium, and her all-encompassing story is some sort of crazy masterpiece." James Hynes, author of Next and The Lecturer's Tale
"Tom Carson s unforgettable heroine escapes from The Great Gatsby to take us on a tour-de-force guided tour of the past century, from flipped-out flappers to Dubya s dream of the orgastic future." John Powers, Critic at Large for NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross"