The cover of The Good Humor Man shows a person wearing boots standing next to a pile of cheese snacks in the street. It looks like the cover of a contemporary fiction novel, but make no mistake, The Good Humor Man is science fiction, with a libertarian element.

In a few decades from the present, the government has taken the logical step in dealing with people who eat fatty foods that aren't good for them. It's instituted food Prohibition, banning fatty foods and instituting raids against stashes of fatty food. Squads of enforcers armed with flame throwers destroy contraband on the spot. (The plot resemblance to Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 is not a coincidence. Bradbury is one of the writers mentioned in Fox's dedication. The title also references Bradbury, of course.)

The food Prohibition spawns behavior that readers of this newsletter will recognize as plausible. One scene is set in a speakeasy, where diners munch forbidden, smuggled pastries.

The government also is a big fan of industrial policy. When a bioengineering company named MannaSantos invents a way to grow crops that help humans burn calories, the government applies pressure to try to force the rest of the world to accept the company's products. The resulting trade war causes a second Great Depression. MannaSantos' crops begin to spread their genes into other crops, and the world is threatened with starvation, as people begin to burn calories faster than they can replace them.

The novel also obsesses over Elvis Presley as the quintessential American, a man who combined America's puritan and hedonistic impulses. The hero of The Good Humor Man is a plastic surgeon, Louis Shmalzberg, whose father, also a surgeon, accidentally killed Elvis in a botched liposuction operation. (In the world of the novel, the operation is covered up, and the King's 1977 death is blamed on other causes.)

Fat from Elvis is kept as a family heirloom until Louis sells is to pay for cancer treatments for his wife. The plot is driven by Louis' efforts to recover “the Elvis,” and by several other groups who also are attempting to recover the Elvis relic.

I read rather more about liposuction and human fat then I wanted to know, but Fox skillfully weaves the various elements of the plot together into a fast-moving, and very unusual book. Fox is a writer who is new to me, but I doubt this is the last that will be heard from him.