Doesticks: What He Says

Doesticks: What He Says is a gloriously unclassifiable piece of 1850s American nonsense. Q. K. Philander Doesticks, that most unreliable of narrators, drags readers through the streets of New York with the confidence of a man who has absolutely no idea what he's doing but insists on describing it anyway. The book collects his encounters with the city's oddest inhabitants, including the legendary witches of New York City, to whom he apparently paid good money for prophecies he now presents 'without the slightest exaggeration or perversion.' This claim, of course, is given in a book that openly admits to being a 'hodgepodge' of absurdities. The humor operates on multiple levels: it's a send-up of earnest travel writing, a critique of Victorian credulity toward spiritualists and seers, and a self-aware performance by an author who knows he's being ridiculous but proceeds magnificently anyway. What elevates the work beyond mere period comedy is its affectionate portrait of New York as a city of wonders, frauds, and ordinary people trying to make sense of it all.