FISHER'S HORNPIPE

by Todd McEwen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1983

William Fisher has a quiet life: he lives in Boston, works in a think tank, messes around very amateurishly with his violin (""Mr. Squeaky""), and has a magnificently unsympathetic law-student girlfriend. But one day, while walking around Walden Pond, Fisher fails on the ice and hurts his head--with the resulting temporary mental confusion leading him into a chance bar-encounter with a skid-rower named Frank of Oregon. And F. of O. has a ""man-i-fetzo,"" a bum's Bill of Rights, which he'd like Fisher to promote--a promotion that eventually culminates in a riot by the down-and-outers of Boston. (They wreck the salad restaurants and boutiques of the restored Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.) This brawl, then, is the one big scene in McEwen's gifted, meandering first novel. And, though it's only half-effective in dramatic terms, it does crystallize the bracing jaundice that zestfully surfaces here whenever McEwen deals with contemporary Boston scenes and mores: the array/nostalgic Orson Welles movie-house ("" 'Natural snacks' that would cleave your guts if they were fresh""); recorders (""The music of the ages as you drool through the wood in your wretched room""); everything from the Indian names of Massachusetts towns to apartment decor. (""Everything in the front room of her apartment was the color of wheat. The walls were light wheat, the drapes heavy wheat burlap, the sofa covered in wheat muslin. Something must be done about the grain surplus thought Fisher It's beginning to affect people's minds."") Unfortunately, however, though there are a dozen or more of these funny, deadly-accurate kidney chops, they don't add up to a satisfying comic novel--only an intensely derivative one: McEwen seems positively transfused with J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man--and he runs through precisely the same stumbling rudenesses, bathroom humors, and sexual predicaments with predatory females that were so fresh in 1958 (the opposite now). Still, if the predictability and lack of substance here are finally disappointing, readers partial to madcap/hip fiction will find quick, acerbic fun along the way--with a few especially devastating laughs for those savvy about the Boston/Cambridge scene.

Pub Date: May 1, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION