Plot
Socially inept garbageman Simon Grim is befriended by Henry Fool, a witty rogue and untalented novelist. Henry opens the world of literature to Simon, and is inspired to write "the great American poem". Simon struggles to get his work recognized, and it is often dismissed as pornographic tat, but Henry continues to push and inspire Simon into getting the poem published.
Henry carries around a bundle of notebooks he refers to as "His Confession", a work that details aspects of his mysterious past that he one day hopes to publish, when he and the world is ready for them. Henry's hedonistic antics cause all manner of turns in the lives of Simon's family, not least of which is impregnating Fay Grim (Simon's sister).
As Simon begins an ascent to the dizzying heights of Nobel Prize-winning poet, Henry sinks to a life of drinking in low-life bars as his own attempts at fame result in rejection, even by Simon's publisher who once employed Henry. The friends part ways and lose touch until Henry’s criminal past catches up with him as he needs Simon’s help in fleeing the country.
Read more about this topic: Henry Fool
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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