Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist

Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist, Laurie Foos, Coffee House Press, 1997

This is the story of Frances, the teenage daughter of a famous eccentric sculptor who does all his work sealed away in the basement of their Connecticut home wearing only torn briefs. One day he is found dead of dehydration.

Just before her eighteenth birthday, Frances' mother marries a man who owns three bowling alleys in Florida, a man Frances calls "the Kingpin". She tries to lure Frances into the safety of middle class life of pizza and bowling, and away from art and the dementia that took her husband.

Frances is not happy. One day, she and Bessie, their black housekeeper, visit an aquarium where they watch two walruses copulating. Frances can not stop thinking about them. She sees them everywhere, including in her bedroom. Increasingly afraid, the two women take to the open road to escape the walruses, but they are close behind, and gaining.

This book gets increasingly strange as it progresses. It's also fresh, comic, original, and really good.