The Eric Metaxas Show - #119 - Jim Kunstler

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with Jim Kunstler about his new novel Look, I’m Gone, a hilarious coming of age story set in New York City during the week of the Kennedy assassination. They discuss J.D. Salinger, the strange freedom of childhood in 1960s Manhattan, Kunstler’s own life as a fiction writer, and why the world that once produced great novels, movies, music, and serious literary culture seems to be disappearing. Subscribe for clips from The Eric Metaxas Show to hear politics and culture from a Christian perspective.⭐ PRE-ORDER TODAY:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:⭐ FREE SLAVES with CSI: https://csi-usa.org/metaxas/📢 Don’t Let the Financial Storm Destroy Your Wealth and Future!https://www.metaxasgoldira.com/⚖️ Legal Help Center - Get Free Legal Help Today: https://www.legalhelpcenter.com/🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/💧 Sentry H2O: https://sentryh2o.com/

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey there, folks. You know, you've seen on this program many times I've had as my guest, Jim Cuncelor. And I think I probably said it at one point, but I met Jim Cuncelor when I was up at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs. I was a very young, aspiring fiction writer and got to know Jim Cunzler as someone who mostly wrote fiction. and he still writes fiction, and I thought it would be fun to have him on the program

to talk about that part of his life. Maybe I'm wrong, but here he is, Jim Cuncelor. Hey, a pleasure to see you again, Eric. Yeah, that was over 40 years ago. And then you went on to be a producer of a series of children's videos at Rabbit Ear's Productions, and they were really wonderfully, beautifully done.

I wrote about four. four or five of the scripts. Yep. And they were narrated by, you know, people like Garrison Keeler and other luminaries. And the music was done by, you know, really great musicians like Mark O'Connor and Rai Cooter and wonderful art that went with it. And so it was a pleasure to do those. Well, it's funny because I almost forgot about that.

I mean, yeah. So you and I met in the fall of 1985. Yeah. And 41 years. I, what's that? 41 years ago. Yeah, no, it's not, it's not possible. We met, I was just, just out of college, very confused, very lost.

And, but Alan Chu's, C-H-E-U-S-E, he was a writer and a book critic, and he was up there at Yadot. And he said, he wanted me to, a friend of mine, come with me. And, you know, and that's where we met. Yeah, I think we were looking at the World Series or something on TV at my house. It was, you know, now that you say this, I, that's, yes, probably, probably. Yeah, because you guys didn't have a, that's just a cable TV. That's probably right. And I think, well, in any case, so I knew you as a fiction writer and you had just written

an embarrassment of riches, which is a very, very, very funny novel. can you believe how long ago this is? Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And embarrassment of riches with a weird, wild comedy set in 1805 in the southern wilderness of, you know, Tennessee and Alabama, which had not really been settled very much by then. And it was about these two bumbling botanists looking for a giant sloth because Thomas Jefferson sent them out there to look for it. Right.

It was kind of like making fun of... Lewis and Clark a little bit. But I mean, that's when I met you. So I know you, principally as a fiction writer, at least I did then. And then you're right when I went to work. And I want to talk to you about your new novel, which I have a coffee here, ladies and gentlemen. Look, I'm gone. I want to talk to you about this novel, is how we're getting into this conversation.

But so basically, yeah, so a few years later, I was working. I was the editorial director at Rabbit Ears, writing all these children. books and creating these videos and whatever. And I needed to find great writers because I couldn't write everything myself. And I thought, I wonder if Jim Cuncelor would do this. And so you wrote, I remember you wrote one about Davy Crockett. Yeah. And Johnny Applese, you know.

Saka Jua, the guide of Lewis and Clark. Yes. I did one about Cowboys, one about the Bayou Country. the legends of the bayou. Yeah, so this was like 1990-91-ish, I guess. And the writing in those is spectacular. Yeah, by the way. I think it was Nicholas Cage.

He did Davey Crockett. The Johnny Appleseed one, which is my favorite, I was married by Garrison Keeler, is still on YouTube. So, you know, people can find it easily. Many of these, I mean, yeah, folks, look up Rabbit Ears production. I wrote, I don't know how many. I wrote about 15 of them or something over the years maybe or 13.

I don't know. I wrote a lot of them. I'm still proud of some of that stuff. I wrote a story, the David and Goliath story, and it's narrated by Mel Gibson. I wonder if people can find that. It was, I'm still very proud of that. He did a great job reading it. But anyway, so we did all that.

And then a few years later, I discovered your book, the geography, of nowhere, which just Suzanne and I just flipped out. What year did that book come out? That was 1993, and it was a fluky thing because I was on the path to just writing novel after novel after novel. But I got a call from the editor

of the New York Times Sunday magazine who sent me out on an assignment to write about the suburbanization of Vermont where he had a country house. And so they put me, after I turned that story in, they put me on to several more in the same vein. And I turned one of them into a book proposal, which Simon & Schuster bought. And that became the geography of nowhere. And all of a sudden, I'm a nonfiction writer now for about 10 years.

I wrote several books about urban design and, you know, how we can rescue the landscape from the fiasco of strip malls and housing suburb. divisions and all that. And that led me to write a book called The Long Emergency, which was about the trouble that we were heading into with our economy in the 21st century. And meantime, I wanted to write novels again. So I started pumping out some novels. And I did manage to publish them, even though the book industry itself, the publishing world was going through a very nasty kind of reconfiguration. And it was getting hard for mid-list writers like me to get decent book advances. And they were starting to discriminate against older white guys like me, to put it bluntly.

And at one point, my publisher, Grove Atlantic Books, or the Atlantic My Atlantic, Press, who published seven of my books, including four of my novels, they told me to stop writing fiction. And, you know, I didn't greet that very warmly. So I continued. And now, you know, I'm continuing with a new strategy, which is I'm using boutique publishers, small publishers, instead of the majors, because, you know, they really don't want people like me around. So I really wanted to write this novel that takes place during the Kennedy, the week and week after the Kennedy assassination about a kid in New York City who sent home from prep school. It was Thanksgiving vacation. And Kennedy was-

Okay, so this is the book, excuse me, that I have just read. Yeah. Because I was working on my book on The Revolution, I wasn't allowing myself to do anything fun like read a novel by Jim Concurrent. but finally I finished my book and the first book that I read was this book, Look, I'm Gone, which I want to hold up here. But Jim, you know, I hate to embarrass people, but like you're such a great writer. You have a tremendous gift and I know you have to appreciate that. Your writing is inevitably hilarious and fun.

And so this book, I was just so looking forward. to it. But part of what I enjoyed about it is the setting. You clearly know the world extremely well, and I can't help. I wanted to ask you at some point how close you are to the protagonist of this book. It's got to be very close or something like that. But edit up, for the folks who are listening, have no clue. Say what you just said and explain, you know, this book is set in the, at the very weekend, when Kennedy's assassinated. So this is November 63. Yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

school full of school full of screw-ups. And the, the night before the Kennedy assassination, he's up in the loft of the carriage house playing poker with a bunch of his classmates. he wins a substantial pot of money. The next day the assassination happens, it's a Friday. The headmaster sends all the kids home. And what happens eventually is after the funeral of John Kennedy is that little Jeff is at large in the city on his own with quite a bit of dough to spend.

And he commences to have a series of adventures. Now, you know, I was a kid like that. in a way. I was a kid in New York in 1963, and I was poorly supervised by my parents. They were bad parents, but they didn't tell me what to do and they didn't make me come home at any particular time, really. I was pretty careful about that. I mean, I didn't stay at, when I was 12 years old, I didn't stay out until 4 in the morning. But I went all over the city. I ordered meals and restaurants, I crashed parties. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos.

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is this 12-year-old running around doing this stuff. And a lot of it, for me, part of the charm is the city of 1963 because it's really just... It's a different world, Eric. Well, that's what I'm saying. And I'm old enough to remember a little bit of that. So you must have been roughly 12 at that time, 63. I'm trying to do the math.

Yeah, I was a little bit older than the kid in the story, but not much, but maybe 14. But the point is you know this world so well, and that's part of what I marvel about in the book, is you're recreating restaurants and a whole world that I know is exactly right. Folks, before we go, I want to recommend to you in case you want to do something crazy and beautiful, we are doing another campaign with our friends at CSI. These folks are heroes. If you want to free a slave, literally, this is what CSI does. Every $250 sets one captive free and puts them into a life of freedom, sets them up.

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Welcome back, folks. I'm talking to Jim Cunceler. James Howard Cuncelor, who is among other things, a fiction writer. We're talking about his new novel, which I have read and loved. It's called Look, I'm Gone. And so, Jim, I want to ask you so much. I really don't normally talk to people about novels. But this is a comic novel.

It is absolutely hilarious. They're very, very, very few people who can write funny. And you are at least one of those people, maybe two. and you do it. You've done it in many of the books of years that I have read. But in this one, the innocence of this character,

it's just so funny that he's 12 years old and he's running around the city doing crazy stuff. The center of this story really is, and this is what inspired me, was thinking about a kid like me having a romance with a Broadway ingenue.

and that's exactly what happens in the story. A young Jeff, by one means or another, ends up in a Broadway show that's like the sound of music, you know, with a cast full of kids. And he develops an instant crush on the middle girl in the cast and the family. And he contrives to go backstage and meet her and then basically starts a romance with Now, it's not a sexual thing. It never develops into a sexual thing. But, you know, this is his first, you know, experience with love and romance.

And he's met this fantastically talented and gorgeous 13-year-old girl backstage. And they commence to, you know, he takes her out for dinner. And then he invites her to the family Thanksgiving party, which ends up. But even before we get there, the sophisticated, what kills me, what makes it so far. funny is just the sophistication of this 12-year-old Manhattanite that he just kind of knows his way around restaurants just enough to pull this off. Yeah. And that alone is-

And, you know, do it all the things that, you know, basically adults to. He understands. And this is actually what it was like growing up in Manhattan. You know, I don't know about you, but, you know, I had to learn how to hail a cab and how to tip a cab driver and, you know, how to order an. restaurant and how to get here and there and how to deal with bank tellers and shopkeepers and you know basically to interact with the adult world fully which you do when you're a kid in Manhattan and yeah but the world of 1963 it's just it's just a great world and all the

references and I mean the setting is great uh the setup is great um so there's another major thing that's going on here And I'd like readers to understand this. You know, this is 1963, and every teenage boy in America is reading The Catcher in the Rye. And Jeff is turned on to this by a kid on the train on his way to New York City after the Kennedy assassination. And he happens to get a hold of a copy while he is home, and he starts reading it. And like every teenage boy in 1963, he identifies deeply with the main character, Holden Caulfield. and he starts to develop this ambition to go find J.D. Salinger and talk to him about a lot of things, including the Kennedy assassination.

And partly because the character in J.D. Salinger's book says that when you find a book that you love, you really want to talk to the author of it. So the last third of the book is little Jeff Greenaway going up to rural New Hampshire, which, by the way, is near where his school is, and crashing in on J.D. Salinger on a snowy night when a bullseousal. You have to. And he's stuck with him for 306 hours. Not everybody listening to you knows. So I have to say this.

So they get this. ladies and gentlemen jd salinger was famously reclusive he he was hiding it nobody knew where he lived everybody was fantasizing about you know what's he doing now or magazine never talked to anybody but so the idea that you could actually track him down it'd be like trying to find thomas pinchin who's who's much less well known even than than salinger but that's part of what's crazy about this and then of course this this kid uh fancies and himself like Holden Caulfield and he just starts cursing just because he's read it in in in catching there.

I mean, even that is funny. We're going to go to another break, but there's so much in here, Jim. And I think what always amazes me about a book, I'll say this before we go to the break is like being able to pull it off. You've got this whole conceit. You're inflating something. Are you going to be able to pull this off? and the fact that you do that

so wonderfully, you know, my hat off to you. Just tremendous talent being able to do that. The book is, Look, I'm Gone. We'll be right back.

Welcome back talking to Jim Kuntler about his novel, hilarious novel called Look, I'm Gone. So you were just explaining that this kid, the protagonist, Jeff Greenaway, has read the Catcher in the Rye. He was reading in 1963,

Catcher in the Rye. And he comes up with this crazy, idea of tracking down the reclusive J.D. Salinger. Yeah, so he takes a train up to Windsor, Vermont, which is across the river from where Salinger lives in Cornish, New Hampshire. And he gets all this information from a Time magazine article that was published in September of 1961, I believe. And it gave a certain amount of information about Salinger. Now, Salinger was a character who had gone through some pretty strange personality changes after the Second World War. He was a sergeant in the war in Europe, and he was involved in some of the worst battles at the end of the war,

the Ardenne Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, the Herchen Forest. and he witnessed a lot of really awful things. And at the end of the war, when it was over, he spent several months in a mental hospital, I believe in France or Belgium, before he was discharged. He had kind of a nervous breakdown. He had kind of a nervous breakdown after the war. One of the things that he did was he was an intelligence,

he wasn't an officer, but he was an intelligence operator. and he was assigned to debrief Nazi soldiers and concentration camp victims. And I think that the experience, yeah, I think the experience bent him out of shape. But I want to be clear, he was also ethnically Jewish himself. Yeah. He would say he was, you know, he was like me.

He was a Jewish kid from the Upper East side of New York City. And so he comes out of the, that and he's in the mental hospital. He marries a woman who is a Nazi party member. She's a young doctor. And he meets her, you know, somewhere in what? Yeah. I've never heard.

I've heard this. I've forgotten it. And then they go to America. Meets her over there. Yeah. They go back to America when he's discharged and he immediately gets the marriage annulled. And he sends her home to Germany. the end of that. And he spends the post-war years of the 40s and the very early 50s,

trying to establish his literary reputation in New York City, which he does. You know, he makes a huge splash, first with his stories in the New Yorker magazine. He had been publishing in lesser fiction magazines before that and before the war, even during the war. but after the war, he makes a big splash in the New Yorker, and then the catcher in the Rye comes out in, I guess, 1951. And it's a blockbuster, huge event in American literature. And that seems to freak him out. He just cannot handle celebrity. It makes him very uncomfortable.

So in 1953, he flees New York, and he finds a little broke-down form. wormhouse in New Hampshire. And he moves in. And he starts hanging out with the high school kids. Now, Salinger has in much of his adult life shown an inordinate interest in teenagers. And he, as his mature life went on, he corresponded with, teenage girls. He had an infamous relationship with an 18-year-old Yale freshman named Joyce Maynard, who herself went on to be a fiction writer and a novelist. But he met her when she was 18 in the 1960s, and she published a big story in the New York Times magazine about what it was like to be an 18-year-old hippie girl, you know, in early 1970s. And when did this

come out, though? Didn't it come out, what, in the 90s? Much, much later. And Joyce Maynard was, Joyce Maynard ended up moving in with J.D. Salinger for about a year. And he treated her very badly. And they had a very troubled relationship

for the brief year that they were together. He was a man in his 50s, and she was an 18-year-old girl. Holy cow. And he had had several other relationships with, you know, teenage girls. before her. And Joyce Maynard was kind of a tortured soul about that whole relationship, and it wasn't until about 30 years later that she published a memoir about exactly what went

down with that and, you know, how they lived together. It was useful to me, because you got a lot of information. Forgive me, we'll be right back talking to Jim Cuncelor. Welcome back talking to Jim Cuncelor about his novel. Look, I'm gone, and about fiction writing. general, and you're talking about one of the figures in the book, and I want to talk to you about this whenever we get there, but is J.D. Salinger? It's more or less his debut as a, as a fictional character in American literature. And he's, he passed away about 2010. He was very old at that point. He's like 92 years old. But he's gone, and, you know, he's now

fair, fair game for the fictional treatment. So what, what I was, saying earlier before the break was that, so he had this relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, who wrote a memoir about their life together many, many years later. And it helped me because you got a lot of information about what it was actually like to be around the guy, you know? Yeah. Exactly what his house was like. He had very strange and interesting dietary things going on. You know, he was like a, uh, uh, uh, the original health food nut of the 1950s and 60s. Um, he would only eat. Um, he would only eat.

Hmm. That it, I mean, he reminds me a little bit of Howard Hughes to like, you get weird. He was, he's weird. Yeah. Yeah. He's very weird. And he does things like he watches daytime TV. You know, he has like game shows that are favorites of his.

Um, and, uh, you know, he has a movie projector and he watches old, Hitchcock movies and old movies from his childhood from the 30s and 40s, his youth. He watches them continuously. And, you know, when he landed in New Hampshire, he developed these friendships with the high school kids and hung out with them. He would go to basketball games with them and invite them over to his house afterwards and, you know, make them popcorn and play jazz records for him. So he's a weird guy, but I learned a lot about.

exactly what it was like to be around him. And he was also, by the way, as many of the J.D. Salinger fans who followed him know he was very interested in Eastern religion and, you know, Indian religions, Hindu religion. And so when Jeff comes up to see him, you know, they have one contentious argument after another about, you know, the food that he's serving, because there's stuck there in a blizzard. But before you get into this, just the idea, let's just be clear, the idea that this 12-year-old manages to figure out how to actually get to J.D. Salinger, he's a recluse. He has designed a world so that you can't find him.

Nobody interviews him, nothing. But this resourceful 12-year-old figures out a way. And it's so well done. So I just have to say as a reader, Jim, it's a really very rare and delightful thing as a reader when you're taking along on a journey where you're trusting the author and the delight of going with this 12-year-old protagonist on this journey and wondering, is he going to get in? What happens when he knocks on the door or whatever? And you pull that off so well.

that I was genuinely wondering whether this might have happened to you because it's so real. You've created a world that is so real and so plausible. But anyway, so I learned a big lesson when I started writing nonfiction books. And by the way, I came out of the world of journalism. And I started when I was 23 years old, 22 years old as a newspaper reporter. And, you know, I did a lot of just sheer gum shoe work as a journalist. So I learned something very important. The difference between writing nonfiction and fiction is nonfiction, you have to be correct.

In fiction, you just have to be plausible. You have to really persuasively create a believable world. people will agree to be put into a spell in. And that's what, you know, that's what really, most of the performing arts or, you know, the literary arts, the dramatic arts, involve putting the observer or reader into a spell that they don't want to get out of, that is pleasurable to be in. And I think that that's something very important that a lot of fiction. writers don't understand and never learn, including especially the ones who come out of the

university writers workshops, you know, where they basically cultivate a kind of a fiction based on, you know, sob stories. And that's what American fiction has come to. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about American fiction because I think that's what's, I really don't read novels anymore, pretty much, because. of what you're talking about. Yeah. Because they're, you know,

they're not entertaining. They're, they're somehow mannered and pretentious. Uh, I don't know what it is that I don't even know, is there a world of, of, of fiction anymore?

What is the, what is that world, that literary world? Does it exist anymore? I, I can't even imagine. Not so much. Uh,

not so much because, you know, the publishing world has been taken over by 23 year old wokesters from Brown University. And, you know, they have, they cultivate,

their own subject matter, which seems to be proportionately, mostly third-world writers, you know, writing about cultures that are not our culture. You know, I wanted to write a book about my culture, and I did. But it's hard to find. I'm reading a novel now by someone I enjoy. Lionel Shriver is, you know, I don't remember actually don't remember the title of the current one I'm writing. She wrote a very successful one about eight or ten years ago called The Mandibles about, and it was sort of, you know, along the lines of the things I was writing about. It was about a collapsing American society and a family caught up in this collapse

and what happens to them over a period of, you know, five or ten years and how their world kind of disintegrates. So Lionel Shriver is, you know, still doing it. And I don't know, there are a bunch of other people. I kind of lost track of Jonathan Franzen. But he's still alive. I don't know if he's publishing anymore. I mean, I've lost touch with that world. I had hoped, you know, when I met you, I thought there's this whole world and I want to enter that world.

And I never did. I never did. I had my Jesus born-again experience in 1988. and it's like I was punted into another, you know, part of the universe. And so I really, it's just so strange as the decades have passed, the world of fiction. So that's why to discover your book. And, you know, I mentioned to you, I guess, at some point, Mark Helprin is someone else who, Oh, yeah, Mark Helpern is a wonderful American writer, published, I don't know, 10 or 12 books, I suppose.

And I've read about four or five of them. And, yeah. But, you know, he doesn't sell that many books. People don't, he's not promoted very well. Well, not anymore. Not anymore. I'm having, I'm having dinner with him tonight, actually. Would you tell him that I'm a big fan?

Yes, I will. Yes, I will. And I'll tell him you to read your books. Yeah, I admire him hugely. We're about the same age. Yeah, I never have met him. I wish I had. Yeah.

He's a tremendous talent. Well, I've interviewed him for Socrates in the city a couple of times. and we should yeah we should talk because he's but he's just one of these rare figures like you he can actually write in a way that you want to read what he wrote you know.

He's got a beautiful pro style. Yeah some amazing amazing stuff amazing I discovered him I never tire of saying this while I was at Yale I took a you know a fiction writing course

which is just stupid but I don't I was a sophomore. I got a see in my junior. And well, it's the whole thing is so stupid. But but the, the professor whose surname was actually Faulkner, you know, kind of gave us mimeographed short stories to read. And one of them was by somebody I'd never heard of, Mark Helperin. And it was called the, the Schroeder Spitzer.

Yeah, about a guy who gets his life back together in Switzerland, climbing mountains. One of the greatest, one of the greatest short stories I've ever. read. And the first line of it is in Munich are many men who look like weasels. And even that sentence, the structure of that sentence

sounds like a translation from the German. In Munich are many men who look like weasels. He sent it up immediately. So I was hooked, but I never knew many years later, it's got to be a well, 10 years later, I don't know if I was in Martha's Vineyard in a bookstore and I see the

Paris Review and there was an interview with him and I read the interview standing there in the bookstore and I thought this guy sounds like a conservative. Holy cow, one of the greatest writers I've ever read and he's concerned. Anyway, but I there's just a tiny handful of people who have written books that I would want to read and you're in that handful. So I want to keep talking to you about your new book, Look, I'm Gone. But let me just give you 30 seconds before we go to the break. When did you decide that you wanted to write this book? Like, How did that happen? I don't know.

You know, I mean, I'm very involved in writing what I consider to be conservative, political commentary, which I do twice a week. And, you know, it's a very absorbing job that, you know, I take seriously. But somehow I've been managing to pump out a whole bunch of novels in between. So, you know, the idea just seized me and I ran with it. And I'm tormented with the writer's block, so I got it done. I don't think writer's block exists. I think it's a made-up stupid thing.

I really, I don't even know what it is. We're talking to Jim Kuntzler. The book is, look, I'm gone. Hey there, folks, I've been saying that 2026 must be the year of accountability. Whether talking about government spending or the way we steward our own families, we have a moral duty to seek the truth. But let's be honest, in the world of Medicare, truth is often the first casualty. Seniors, like my 91-year-old mom, are bombarded with mailers and pushy phone calls that feel more like propaganda than helpful guidance.

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That's Chapter at 571-4-2-1-2-3. Talk to a real person and get the honest answers you deserve. Welcome back talking to Jim Cunzler, whose new novel, which is, hilarious and highly recommended is, look, I'm gone. So, yeah, where do we go from here, Jim? We're talking about... Yeah, let's talk about the state of fiction. The state of fiction itself, which depends on a book industry,

a publishing industry that works. And the publishing industry has its adjuncts, too, namely the book reviewers and the people who spread the word about what's worth reading and what's not worth reading. And that is all gone. Look, it's gone. It's gone. Look, it's gone.

There are no more book reviewers, really. Maybe, you know, the New York Times still has a book review section on Sunday. And, you know, they still review books. But nobody else really does. But wait a minute. Wait a minute. Do they review your books? No, no, no.

They wouldn't review my books. Well, that's the point. I'm coming out with a 600-page book on the American Revolution. Straight up nonfiction. No angle. It's just a book on the Revolution. My guess is that they won't review it. The Washington Post won't review it. So we're living in a weird... The editor will look you up on Wikipedia and he'll get that you are affiliated with the opposition,

show with a political opposition, and they'll just ignore it. So, yeah. Then, you know, the question is, how does the public become aware of what's even out there? What we're witnessing is the very strange disintegration of the major art forms of our time. Exactly. The rock and roll, the long playing record, rock and roll record was the art form of my generation. And it doesn't exist anymore. There are no more, really any more record labels with record deals. People don't buy records.

People don't buy CDs. They just stream it. I mean, there's a small community of people who buy old vinyl, you know, or even new vinyl. They do put it out, but it's very small. It's a meech thing. So, you know, we were shocked to see that the record industry and rock and roll with it disintegrated. And now we're even more shocked to see that Hollywood is collapsing and the movie industry

is collapsing. I was just going to say, it's all of a piece. I mean, it is all the world that we grew up in and we thought we would be entering that world that it's just receded. And who would have ever believed that the, the movie, the motion picture would be a transient thing that, you know, that within our lifetimes, it would almost look like it's going away. And it kind of looks like it's like novels.

It's like novels. I mean, there was a world, but the thing is technology is also involved. That's right. The fact that many people now can have a gorgeous flat screen TV means I don't need to hike to some dirty theater and watch previews. I can just skip that. Well, yeah, except that, you know, the movie theaters only became dirty if they're in their last Cineplex incarnation.

They used to be grand and magnificent in the heyday of Hollywood. You know, I mean, you would go into one of these magnificent, gigantic theaters in Manhattan, you know, that were decorated like Aztec city. or medieval fantasies, you know, and with turrets. Radio City, I saw when I was a kid, my dad took me, I guess it must have been 1969, so I was like maybe six years old, and he dragged me to see true grit with Glenn Campbell, with John Wayne and Glenn Campbell and stuff. But, I mean, I saw that at Radio City, you know, yes, you're right.

There were great places, not just Radio City. So people don't do that anymore. and and uh but you know that that's at the uh basically the consumer end at the production end you know there's got to be somebody who's going to make the movies and increasingly uh there are too many weird impediments to even getting a movie made you know they cost too much the union rules are making it impossible for people to work in in california um uh i i is now bouncing into the scene You know, it's really disrupting the scene completely. Now, the fact of the matter is, the human race has not really changed in terms of, you know,

the kind of animal that we are, the intelligent sapient animal that we are. And we need stories. We crave stories. We absolutely require stories to help us navigate through the complications of the human project, which is not like the simple life of an animal. You know, it involves language and it involves navigating through complex relationships between, you know, commercial relationships

and family relationships and political relationships. So we need stories to instruct us how to live. While you're making these highfalutin observations, I want to remind people, your new book is called, Look, I'm Gone. It is a very funny novel set in New York. York City in 1963. When we come back, I will talk to the author because I can. Folks, this is important. If Medicare has you confused, if you've got questions, we understand,

and this is why we recommend our friends at Chapter. They're there to help you to kind of talk you through what might work best for you. This is very important that you get it right. You can call them at 571-421-1253. These are our friends at Chapter. 571, 421, 1253. Final segment with Jim Kuntler, whose book is being discussed right now by me and him. Look, I'm Gone is the title.

So, Jim, it's entertaining and it's funny and poignant. But I just want to ask you about some of the comic things in it. You contrive. to have this 12-year-old buy a cheap disguise kit. And he pulls out these little mustaches and he wears them. Where the heck did that come from? Because that's one of the funniest things. The idea of him walking around with a fake mustache, this 12-year-old,

is itself hilarious. Yeah, there are several instances in the book where in the story where some adult character stops him and asks him, you know, why he's doing it. He's obviously a child. And he says, you know, he's practicing to be an adult. And, you know, he keeps on, he goes down, before he leaves New York City to find J.D. Salinger,

he takes himself out for dinner at Luchows, which was a famous restaurant on 14th Street. There you go. And that's another example of, as I'm reading the book, I just thought Luchows, the only reason I even know of the existence of Luchos, Chowes is in a John Cheever short story, he refers to Luchowse. It was a famous place in the mid-20th century.

Yeah. So my character goes in there, you know, and the waiter comes up to him and asks him, you know, initially if he'd like a beverage. And the kid says, yeah, I'll have a scotch and soda. And the waiter, of course, says, we don't serve children here. But he's picked up this disguise kid in one of those Times Square joke shops, you know, which sells, you know, plastic ice cubes with flies in them and disappearing ink and whoopee cushions and stuff. And so, yeah, he's trying to pass himself

off as an adult. And it's sort of working for him a little bit, but he's still a child. But that's what's so funny about is that he's on that borderline. And the whole story with this with the girl the Broadway ingenue. And they're both in this liminal period of development where they're probably not really ready for sexual relationships,

but they're beginning to be aware that there's a difference between men and women and that they sort of fit together in a certain way and that there are rules of attraction to bring in a Brit Easton Ellis title. But he's discovering in this liminal period that he's now inhabiting of development, he's discovering girls. Well, the whole thing, I know I'm repeating myself, but it's very funny. From beginning to the end, it's very, very funny.

And, you know, one of the highest compliments you can give an author is to say, I wish it hadn't ended. I wish I could read the sequel immediately. it's a wonderful world to inhabit for the reader. You've, you know, you pull that off routinely. As I said, you're tremendously gifted. But to be able to be really funny in the way that you set the stuff up, it's just a great gift. So I hope you will continue to write fiction.

I really do. Yeah, I'm about to start a 1960s college novel about, you know, the hippie world. I actually have already written one hippie novel, but it's about a girl who drops out of NYU in 1967 to go to a Vermont hippie commune. That one was called a safe and happy place, and it's still out there. But I want to write a, you know, strictly a campus novel about men, you know, male students. Do you have a title? No. Well, I sort of do, yeah. You sort of do. And I'm not going to tell you what it is.

You know, that's fine. But, well, look, you've written many books. I've written a lot of them. I remember Thunder Island I read back when I first met you. Crazy stuff. But again, this is, I don't think it's just because I have just read it. But I think it's probably my favorite of your stuff. And again, it's funny. and I hope some people will read it and enjoy it as much as I did. Do you get much feedback? We only have like 20 seconds, but I'm just curious. I get some feedback.

You know, I haven't really gotten any reviews in it. But, you know, there's no reviewing infrastructure left, so I don't look for reviews. You know, it's reviewed on Amazon, but everybody's book is reviewed on Amazon. So, you know, the thing is, I have a readership from, from, from my blog and from all my other books. And I hear from those people. Okay. All right.

We're going to have to leave it there. Jim, just great to talk to the author of Look, I'm Gone. Thanks for being my guest. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Eric.