"Ride a Cockhorse is at once high comedy and a mordant account of the paranoid personality, but this is only part of the elaborate business that Kennedy has undertaken; he has also brought off the improbable if not impossible–a novel about a bank! The best comic novel to come my way in a long time." –Jonathan Yardley,
The Washington Post "Business booms for Mrs. Fitz, but then the hilarious manipulations of the press and her superiors give way to a Fascistic reign of terrors over her inferiors, and Mr. Kennedy has us pinned at precisely the point where the comic turns nasty." –
The New Yorker "Perhaps the funniest American novel since John Kennedy Toole's prize winner,
A Confederacy of Dunces." –
Newsweek "God knows, it must be hard to write a funny book about New England banking, but Kennedy has done it . . . Frankie Fitzgibbons is an inspired creation, a cross between Maggie Thatcher and Darth Vader." –
Boston Phoenix "Kennedy is a master storyteller . . . The author's vision has to do with a real wisdom of the heart." –Raymond Carver
"A wonderful comic . . . a ribald, risible and riveting read." –
People Magazine "Truly . . . one of this country's finest writers." –
Boston Globe "The kind of novelist who gets high praise in sophisticated places." –Anatole Broyard,
The New York Times "There are plenty of funny scenes in
Ride a Cockhorse, a number of them good enough to make you laugh out loud." –
New York Newsday "Ferociously comic . . . a believable blend of farce and tragedy. Raymond Kennedy is a novelist of such diabolical artistry that he may be the most original American writer since Flannery O'Connor . . ." –Joseph Coates,
The Chicago Tribune "If a sentence Raynond Kennedy wrote, then it is a sentence an artist made." –Gordon Lish
It's only the very rare work that can officially be deemed a classic a mere twenty-one years after its publication, but such a one is Raymond Kennedy's Ride a Cockhorse, newly republished New York Review Books' marvelous Classics series. I can't imagine how I missed Ride a Cockhorse the first time around, for it is one of the funniest novels I've ever picked up and also quite sui generis: Kennedy's voice is entirely idiosyncratic, his tale of a reign of terror at an unremarkable Connecticut valley bank a startling mixture of the ludicrous and the appalling. –Brooke Allen,
Barnes and Noble Review
