Where's Daddy

Tom Wade came home to Westport on a Wednesday evening and told his wife he had quit his lucrative advertising job to write The Great American Novel. Em had been a good wife for twelve years -- she reeled a bit but was determined to support her husband in his aim, while their son Gordy, an enthusiastic Little Leaguer, was simply thrilled to have Daddy home for evening practice. But the neighbors, who had always trusted Tom, were hurt and horrified. Bob Talbot, their closest friend, spoke for the whole community of Madison-Avenue-commuters when he insisted Tom was already one helluva writer: “There hasn’t been as brilliantly sustained writing in America in the past twenty years as your Frozyumyum copy.” The laundry man kissed Tom’s custom good-bye, but the Wade liquor bill soared to $140 in a month, and the cleaning woman quit—because, of course, Tom hadn’t written a word, but had started out waxing the floor, defrosting the refrigerator, ironing slips, planning a study, beginning his literary journal, and daydreaming about agents, publishers, producers, and movie stars.

Life with a future Salinger soon palled on Tom’s wife and son, and Em was coming close to leaving her husband when he suddenly booked passage for the Wade family on a tramp steamer to Spain. "What a place to write!" Tom exulted when they arrived. "No wonder Don Quixote is so long!” The Wades settled down near Torremolinos in a colony of non-writing writers, and soon Tom's defection was to spearhead a job-quitting movement that threatened to drain the Avenue of all its available talent. The solution to this problem, Tom’s involvement with a couple of smuggling night-club girls, and Em’s loyal search for her lost husband up and down the Casbah in Tangier, sweep this riotously funny novel to its happy conclusion.