Cooler by the Lake - Hardcover

Max Nutmeg is a very small-time Chicago con man, patriarch of a large and extended family of predictably lovable scuzzballs. Max's new scam is penny-ante but cumulatively lucrative: well- dressed and with an empty gas can in his hand, he stops people in the street and gives them an oh-so-sincere story about having run out of gas and having left his wallet at home. He embroiders the story at whim, and does okay. More than okay when a woman who gives him a dollar also drops her wallet and doesn't realize it. Inside are $800 plus credit cards plus an incriminating love letter. Max senses that his ship has come in, thanks to Loretta Spokeshave's loss--and his attempts to return the wallet power the rest of the very thin story here. What Heinemann (the National Book Award-winning Paco's Story, 1986, etc.) seems really interested in, though, is a Runyon-esque or Studs Terkel-ish paean to my-kind-of-town-Chicago; the book is little more than a collection of lowlife, inverted-snob details that sometimes are cute (good description of an O'Hare-area bar featuring female Jell-O wrestling; the off-camera mores of Wrigley's bleacher bums) but more often just cutesy (as in never mentioning a street name without giving its pedigree: ``Western Avenue, the longest street in the city, was so named because at one time it was the city limits; and Granville was named for Granville Temple Sprout, one of Chicago's first teachers, though experts differ and no one seems to know why the city used his first name''). Passably diverting for a local magazine market, but, in covers, it reads at the same time over- and under-strenuous, flat, and simply unfunny. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Although readers of Heinemann's first two books (the Vietnam novels Close Quarters and Paco's Story , which won the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction) may be surprised by the radical change of subject matter and mood in the author's new work, they will recognize continuity in his prose: here, the straightforward, spoken-language-style narrative voice tells the story of Maximilian Nutmeg, a small-time con artist who one day does an honest thing, returning intact a wallet he has found containing $800. It takes more than 200 pages to get the wallet back to its original owner, but the pass-off never becomes the grand event its buildup promises. The oddball characters and slapstick plot turns are sometimes charming, but usually are more silly than funny. The novel constantly interrupts itself with long asides that never attach themselves firmly enough to the story, although they often succeed as humorous vignettes. And the text is peppered with parentheses--as many as seven pairs per page. Often the information within them would have been more cogently presented between commas, but, as with most of the devices employed in this very hit-and-miss book, when the parenthetical asides are done well they contribute an appropriate, jovial casualness to the mood. The setting, Chicago, is always in the forefront, and virtually every mention of a street, avenue or district comes complete with an explanation of how it got its name. The flaw of the novel, which finally just misses the comedy it strives for, lies in Heinemann's overindulgence of his sense of humor and in his tendency to ramble.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.