Kim Hodous Talks About Roberta Grimes’s Novel, Jack in Love

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Your Seek Reality host is the wonderful Kim Hodous, back with us for the fourth time, who has graciously volunteered to read Roberta’s new novel, which is fresh out this summer from Hybrid Global Publishing, and to interview its author. The year is 1968, and Jack Richardson is a 28-year-old Fifth Avenue penthouse hermit who is suddenly famous, because he has just been pronounced by Time Magazineto be “The Richest American Under the Age of Forty” following his gangster father’s sudden death. Jack has inherited a billion-dollar fortune in ill-gotten international gains; although Jack’s father had somewhat redeemed himself by spearheading much of Detroit’s retooling to make tanks and planes to help the United States to win the Second World War. But Jack cares nothing for any of that. He is 6’8” tall, depressive and autistic, and the only child of a mother who is also deceased, but who had abused him sexually from his infancy as her only way to battle her husband. Our heroine, Bobbi Christian, is a sweet and naïve recent graduate of Smith College who has moved to Manhattan to learn how to program a gigantic new IBM 360 computer at Larkin Enterprises, which is Jack’s holding company. Bobbi is planning to start there, then go to law school, then eventually become the first woman President of the United States. Jack’s dating life consists in having his people send him Larkin employees with whom he can share dinner and after-dinner trysts; but when Larkin sends him Bobbi, she overwhelmingly entertains and delights him. They click at once, and so deeply that Jack persuades Bobbi to move in with him. Our girl has no real experience, but she is so kindly that she at once sets about trying to fix Jack’s whole messed-up life; although not without a lot of resistance from him. The reader watches each of them trying to figure things out, as Jack both fears, and also is eager to learn how to trust someone enough to finally leave his shell. A billion dollars in the Sixties was like what a trillion dollars would be today, and Jon Richardson left mostly real estate all over the world, including in the People’s Republic of China. Soon Jack has renamed Bobbi “Vixen”, after his childhood dog who kept biting him. Jon’s trustee, who still controls Jack’s father’s estate, is soon sending them on colorful worldwide jaunts, to claim assets before they can escheat to foreign governments. Jack’s only prep school friend tricks Jack into holding a New Year’s Eve party for their Phillips Andover class, and he thereby helps Jack to realize that, far from being the class goat that he had long thought he was, of course Jack is richer than any of them. And thanks to Vixen’s inventive nurturing, he is becoming self-confident enough to begin to put a lot of his past to rest. For Jack and Vixen, what had been a precarious relationship at first, has over the past two years become a deep and genuine love that we know can last a lifetime. As Jack turns thirty and claims his fortune, he asks Vixen to marry him. But, what about Gloria Steinem and Women’s Liberation? What about Bobbi’s own big dreams? She has helped this man she adores grow up, but she is only 24. Who is she going to be when she herself turns 30? When Vixen talks about going to law school now, babe, Jack tells her she will never need law school, honey, because she never will have to work a day in her life. As Bobbi tries to think more clearly. she comes to see Jack’s marriage proposal as really a terrible, impossible choice that she must make between her beloved darling and herself.

Check out our video chat here: