Upfronts: The Road Narrows As You Go

By Lee Henderson

All Wendy Ashbubble has ever wanted is to draw comics as well as Charles Schultz’s Peanuts—and to one day see her creations grace the pages of a major daily newspaper. Growing up in Victoria in the 1970s, Wendy dreams of getting out, getting away … and getting recognition for her talent. And there’s another, never-whispered motivation that prompts her to seek her fortune: a deeply buried memory and unshakeable belief that her unknown father is Ronald Reagan, the fortieth president of the United States.

A chance meeting in Victoria with an attractive-but-mysterious travelling artist inspires Wendy to take the plunge, and she runs away to live in a dilapidated artists’ commune in San Francisco. There, amid the haze of top-quality weed, unbridled creativity, and unfettered sex, her dream begins to take tangible shape. With the aid of Frank Fleecen, an up-and-coming bonds trader and agent, Wendy’s Strays are soon competing for newsprint space against the likes of Berkeley Breathed, Jim Davis, and Bill Watterston … even against Wendy’s beloved Charles Schultz himself.

But there are darker shades on the pencilled horizon: the spectre of AIDS, unexplained disappearances, bad therapy, junk bonds, demonology, and SEC agents investigating Frank’s business protocols.

The Road Narrows As You Go is simultaneously the portrait of a young woman struggling to find her place and a bright, rollicking, unflinching depiction of the 1980s. It embodies all the brash optimism and ruthless amoralism of the decade, as well as its preoccupation with repressed memories, and fully captures the flavour of an uncertain but deeply vibrant era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Mar 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9780143192251

Lee Henderson

LEE HENDERSON is the author of two novels The Man Game, which won the 2009 BC Book Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and The Road Narrows As You Go, published in 2014, and the award-winning short story collection The Broken Record Technique. He is a contributing editor to the arts magazine Border Crossings in Canada and has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals. He lives in Victoria, B.C., and teaches creative writing at UVic.

Book preview

ONE

What we remember most about living in the manor on the peak of Bernal Heights was the door buzzer going off in the days and nights after comic strip artist Hick Elmdales died. For years afterwards every time we heard that buzzer, the memory echoed in our ears and reminded us of the strange connection Hick’s death had to the first days of our new life. You know that sound you hear before you fall asleep, of blood whistling past your eardrum? It was the last Friday in April eighty-one, and it was our first night at No Manors.

You might not know the name Hick Elmdales, but he drew the popular Pan strip launched back in seventy-five to further the adventures of J.M. Barrie’s characters Peter, the Lost Boys, Hook, the Darling children, signed Walt Disney. Hick lived and worked far, far away from the animation sweatshops in Los Angeles; he was up on