Winkie

Starred review from March 6, 2006
This debut novel from memoirist Chase (The Hurry-up Song
) begins with the capture and wounding by a SWAT team of the eponymous, sentient teddy bear in a backwoods cabin; the team thinks it has captured a mad bomber. In jail, Winkie, who no one denies is a teddy bear, must contend with cruel jailers; his stuttering, court-appointed lawyer named Unwin; the 9,678 counts of everything from treason to witchcraft he's charged with; and the intersection of his life with that of the previous possessor of the cabin, an old humanities professor whose bombs never worked. While marking time, Winkie contemplates his past: his ownership by the Chase family, his loneliness when on a shelf , his magical awakening to life one morning—marked by a bowel movement so lovingly described that it recalls Bloom's in Ulysses
. The sections devoted to Winkie's trial is a minor masterpiece of ridiculousness, in which the prosecution's move to end the trial after it has presented its side sounds uncomfortably close to what we read in the newspapers. This book is way too odd to be sentimental, and its political sensibility shuttles easily between the cartoonish and the shrewd. Chase puts himself in the same league as David Sedaris with this unclassifiable debut.

July 15, 2006
Once upon a time in a shack deep in the forest lived a worn-out teddy bear with big ears and glass eyes that opened and closed. A year earlier, a lonely Winkie, tired of decades of neglect by the now-adult children who once loved him, had willed himself to life and fled his suburban home to find freedom, companionship, and love in the woods. But now he lies alone in the shack, mourning his past life as the plaything of generations of children, while outside an FBI SWAT team waits to capture the mad bomber they believe to be terrorizing the nation. So begins Chase's (The Hurry-Up Song) witty allegory on our paranoid, Orange Alert times. In an opening scene of comic absurdity, Winkie is shot, handcuffed, and whisked away to jail despite the doubts of the chief detective. "Could be a master of disguise, he mused; maybe wore masks, walked around on stilts or something to seem taller." And Winkie's trial is a masterpiece of Kafkaesque surrealism, with witnesses from the trials of Socrates, Galileo, and the Salem witches testifying against him. But Chase's novel is also a lovely meditation on the nature of love, loneliness, and existence. As Franoise, the lesbian Muslim cleaning woman who befriends Winkie, advises, "You only have to let them know you exist." In this most unusual debut novel, which was inspired by the author's childhood teddy bear, Winkie lives!Wilda Williams, Library Journal

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2006
With the recent controversy over domestic spying, the literary world is ripe for skewering America's unwieldy War on Terror--but good. In this wryly comic, paradoxically touching first novel, Chase delivers a cleverly original allegory on the absurdities of our terror-obsessed culture. After suffering years of neglect by children who have grown and moved on, a tattered teddy bear named Winkie miraculously discovers the power of movement and runs away to the forest to begin a new life. Unfortunately, this particular forest has been pigeonholed as the hideout for a notorious terrorist, and militant FBI agents quickly surround Winkie with drawn weapons and whirling helicopters. Unsure quite what to make of the diminutive quadruped--Is he a Middle-Eastern midget or a bizarre genetic experiment?--the authorities nevertheless trot out their standard interrogation techniques while charging the little bear with unparalleled barbarism. In the surrealistic courtroom circus that follows, Winkie faces a gauntlet of bizarre witnesses from the trials of Socrates, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde--an ordeal he endures by retreating into memories of the early years that nurtured his awakening. Inspired by a stuffed animal from his childhood (photographs of the bona fide Winkie are sprinkled throughout), Chase turns in a masterfully measured social critique featuring a protagonist as endearing as any from the classics of childhood literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)