CHINESE NEW YEAR

O’Banion’s debut novel follows the adventures of a curmudgeon on a quest to recover his cat.

Life has taken a wrong turn for Alton Tapscott, a retired literature professor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana: his son, Archie, tricked him into moving to St. Ignatius Condo Community; his high-tech hearing implant, LIZA, is malfunctioning again; and now his only trusted friend, a cat named Mack, has gone missing, evicted from the premises by the cunning resident council president, Cooper Murray. This humorous, lightly plotted novel introduces readers to the world of semi-independent living, complete with robotic canine companions, soup nights, and mandatory bingo sessions. In his Kafkaesque struggle against increasingly despotic disciplinary hearings, Tapscott forms alliances with the quirky cast of St. Ignatius residents, including eccentric liberal Camille Renatta, fellow widower Noel Cone, and sinister nun Mary Clotilde, as obsessed with her rose bushes as she is with giving Alton impromptu therapy sessions. Much like Alton, who ends up in a wheelchair he can hardly navigate, the novel struggles to follow any chain of events to a logical conclusion. It is also, for no apparent reason, set in the distant future—a fact that the author never uses to its full potential except to crack an occasional joke: “Residents awoke to the whirring of delivery drones and the slap of competing local newspapers.” St. Ignatius is meant to represent the extreme political opposites of American society (introducing Tapscott to fellow resident Poppy Burt, Murray remarks, “She’s…a terrible racist…but she’ll be dead before the next election”), but the idea gets lost among Tapscott’s lengthy soliloquies on everything from the indignity of growing old to the misfortune of his name. These, fortunately, are often hilarious: “My name is registered with the State of Louisiana as Alton B. Tapscott, but the IRS knows me by Alton Tapscott, Alton Tap Scott, and the always charming, Scott Tap.”

It’s not always clear where this novel is going, but readers will enjoy getting there.