By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee

Blurb

By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee is a satirical novel by Tama Janowitz about the Slivenowiczes, a trailer park trash family who are forced to leave their home in a polluted swamp area in upstate New York and who beg, steal and borrow their way across the United States until they end up in Hollywood. The characters' hyper-intelligent witty repartee, reminiscent of New Yorkers in a Tama Janowitz novel, highlights the tragedy of the family's social and economic descent.
The first person narrator of the novel is 19-year-old Maud Slivenowicz, whose major source of knowledge is Reader's Digest. Her mother, Evangeline, has five children by five different deadbeat fathers. Without a regular income, the Slivenowicz family dream of becoming movie stars, and at the end of the book it seems one of Maud's brothers might actually be given a role in a television commercial.
The title of the book relates to a famous line in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.