Mark Bagshaw

Matt Tupper's War Babies Mark Bagshaw

After a literary lifetime of blockbuster bestsellers, Matt Tupper's numbers have fallen. In a last-ditch effort to revive the glorious old Tupper marque, Matt agrees to his agent's scheme to explore the changes in American values over the past seventy-five years, using his own nuclear family's history. Matt chronicles the edenic innocence of his own wartime childhood and early adolescence, including his fall from grace at the hands (and other parts) of his former high-school psychologist Miss Butz. About the same time, he encounters the dark, morally ambiguous realities of the Cold War as a high-school recruit in the top-secret DARMA program, ostensibly a U. S. government initiative to train future astrophysicists who will help America beat the Russians in outer space, but with strong undercurrents of espionage and counter-espionage. When it becomes clear that no amount of perseverance in the face of adversity is going to lead Matt Tupper to the stars, he finds another way to stardom-telling naughty bedtime stories. The story of his literary development is told by his Russian-American wife Klara, a retired career intelligence officer for the State Department. Her account is followed by a retrospective on Matt's life and work by his troubled writer-son Simon-another kind of 'war baby'-completing the Tupper household triptych.