Kupper Is Loved

UNHAPPILY MARRIED and the father of three adult daughters who simply placate his misplaced infantilization, Bert Kupczyk is a fifty-nine-year old malcontent, recently retired, entirely aimless, and feeling every bit the victim of a life (and a wife) he believes has conspired against him. However, after the unexpected arrival of a mysterious package from a long forgotten uncle, Bert embarks upon a clumsy and comical quest to revisit his past, pen his own memoir, and explain his present unhappiness. And on Christmas morning, as the family comes together for yet another of his wife’s insufferably festive holidays, Bert abruptly walks out. 

So begins a quixotic journey that will take Bert from his burnished memories of St. Louis’s now broken Union Station to a Yuletide celebration full of aging hippies at his sister’s pot-soaked house in Colorado to the Martian-like terrain of his eldest daughter’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona, where, after arriving unannounced, he finds his daughter quite content having embraced another family entirely. Dejected and displaced, Bert’s pilgrimage ultimately brings him to the source of his most cherished memories: Burbank, California, where his father, a doting and rakish man everyone called Kupper, had taken young “Bertie” nearly every summer of his childhood, and whose unexpected passing unraveled Bert’s life seemingly before it began. 

As his parents’ love story cuts through his own narrative, the remembered past and the lived present intersect in ways Bert could not have anticipated, and he is ultimately faced with the very real possibility that his parents—whose epic romance carries such weight in his memory and by whose measure his own life feels such a failure—may not have been who he thought they were, that his past may not be as golden as he remembers, and that just maybe his present may not be as bleak as he believes, all of which lead to a reckoning he could not have imagined. 

INC.

INC. IS A TALE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM comically unraveled. With a lovely wife, two handsome sons, a shiny SUV, a killer golf game, and a mostly brick home in a mostly affluent suburb Gary Cooper Grabowski is living his dream. Even his job rewards him at the corporate level for demonstrating the same talent for window dressing he's long cultivated in his personal life. Affable, agreeable, and conflict averse, Gary simply rolls along, buoyed by his own refined brand of Midwestern savoir fare, and ignoring the pesky inconvenient truths that cause many of us to reflect upon the deeper, often messier details of life. But the devil is always in the details.

And after the unexpected and unwelcome arrival of his father, a cantankerous old cattleman from Gary's blue-collar childhood, Gary's carefully constructed pastiche of a life begins to show its feeble stitching, and a comical series of unplanned events threatens to undo him. Will Gary, the story's basically good but willfully misled protagonist, figure it out before it's too late? The revelation at the end of the novel may surprise the reader as much as it does Gary.