The Fox and the Clam

Peter Leroy

Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber, a dour little boy who later appears, as an adult, in Reservations Recommended. Peter and Matthew seem unlikely friends. Matthew finds little to like in life, and his outlook is decidedly blue. Peter finds much to like in life, though nearly everything puzzles him, and he is essentially sanguine about his future, no matter how groundless his optimism might be. Eventually the friends find, as most friends do, that each has added to his developing self a little of the other.

"The Fox and the Clam is a wonderfully wacky ringing of plot changes on the kind of idiotically moralistic fables that used to fill the pages of elementary school readers." — John Stark Bellamy II, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The Fox and the Clam tells us how Peter learned to read, with many versions of the Fable of the Fox and the Clam; here Peter plays Candide to his cynical classmate Matthew Barber; it is all about happiness and despair, and it is exceedingly wise and exceedingly funny." — Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine

"Clamming is the chief industry of Babbington; the town’s driveways are paved with crushed clamshells, and shapely shells are recycled as knickknacks by Bivalve Byproducts. . . . The apotheosis of clamdom is reached in 'The Fox and the Clam,' in which the clam clearly represents only one thing — being happy-as-a — but does so in a set of thematic variations (ranging from a Saturday-afternoon cartoon about a happy hippo and an unhappy one to a deadly competition having to do with skipping third grade) that raise complicated farce to the level of calculus." — Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker