The passage of almost twenty years has not diminished the power of Kotzwinkle's incisive portrait of American counterculture in the 1960s in The Fan Man (1974). The open-ended aspect of the novel's conclusion has intrigued readers who wondered how Horse Badorties, the book's mythic proto-hippie protagonist, might have managed his life during the succeeding years. In turning to the last decade of the century, however, Kotzwinkle has not written a Badortiesredux to conclude the 1980s, but instead, in developing his comic vision of life in postmodern America, he has created another appropriate character to exemplify the times.