Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

Zaniness and wisdom in farcical settings are in short supply in new fiction, especially where they are employed to create a fun and meaningful experience for readers. THE CURIOUS CHARMS OF ARTHUR PEPPER (MIRA/Harlequin) and MISLAID (Harper Collins) fill this eccentric category. Both novels hearken back to classics. Phaedra Patrick's ARTHUR PEPPER, like Alice, enters a wonderland of strange adventures linked to enigmatic objects and seemingly crazy characters, though a wonder of his land is that it's been hidden for decades behind his daily life.

Nell Zinc's MISLAID seems a descendant of Mark Twain's The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a send-up of class and race in a southern town, where two babies  (like his earlier The Prince and the Pauper) are switched at birth. Zinc's mad-cap novel, also a political send-up of race and class in the south, differs most in that it's driven by gender ambiguity. In Twain, gender hasn't a starring role. In both novels the white children are accepted as black, despite the obvious physical facts. (In Zinc's hilarious book, the white child has platinum hair and almost albino skin,) The black child is also largely unquestioned in Twain's white world, where he is educated to fulfill career expectations. Zinc also has an African-American auto-didact who is accepted by white academia, because he fulfills their notions of intellectual potential.

An interesting aside to Pudd'nhead is that the “switched at birth” situation is discovered through
a finger. Palmistry was a hobby of Twain's. He took hand prints of babies in his town on glass slides and followed them up to see how the lines changed with age. In Pudd'n head, palmistry and the idea of race as destiny, figures in his denouement.

Nell Zinc's characters, who are more propelled by gender, have to straddle the hurdles of class and race for personal safety. Both black and white communities think being “queer” is aberrant, though a fact of Peggy's life. From early adolescence, she figures out she likes girls, though she enjoys being an uber-girl in her cotillion gown. And, in her small town, a backwater from major cities, when Peggy plans to attend the local college, she discards her mother's notion that she needs a name university to marry well. Ironically, she's seduced by local royalty, a famous gay poet employed by the college because of his connections. Lee's attracted to young Peggy ,because she resembles a hipless boy. When she gets pregnant, he marries the “baby dyke” (as Peggy calls her younger self) and they have two children.

Not cut out for domesticity; being the house servant for the flagrant poet lifestyle, nor Lee's sexual rejection, Peggy flips out with a “cry for help.” When Lee threatens to have her committed, she flees with her daughter from backwater prominence to back road anonymity. Finding an abandoned shack and names off gravestones, she passes as a light-skinned African American single mother with her platinum haired, fair skinned daughter. She avoids questions by buying their clothes from thrift stores, working as a scavenger and later with a hapless drug dealer. Meanwhile, Lee is unable to trace Peggy and must deal with their entitled son.

Though scarred by Peggy's abandonment, he enjoys the fickle tastes and prejudices of a privileged college boy. His younger sister, raised, as a poor African American, is street smart with uncompromising ethics.The farce that ensues, when she and her African American auto-didact boyfriend, unknowingly meet her brother at a Halloween frat party is hilarious. A day in court climaxes with an impromptu family reunion. Pretensions and hypocrisy of both Black and White cultures fall equally on Zinc's satiric chopping block.

Zinc has a brittle optimism that all will work out. Peggy's raises an independent daughter, clever and wise beyond her age, while Lee's parenting makes their son an upper crust boy with an unaffordable social conscience. Like Twain's two boys switched at birth, the destiny of the siblings has more to do with their ostensible places in the world than character. But in a final twist, Zinc plays the trump card of genetics. This is a very funny, sly novel.

Arthur Pepper's rabbit hole is the brown suede boots of his deceased wife . When he looks down them and discovers an unknown jewelry box, his life will never be the same. Widower Pepper hides in his apartment, emotionally disconnected a year after his wife's death. Her predictable habits echoed his own, so how could he have had no inkling of this shiny bracelet, not her kind of thing–and the intriguing charms dangling from it?

They become clues to a secret life he had never known existed. Each charm sends him on an adventure that challenges his assumptions about his wife and his notions of life. As the novel begins, Pepper's a 69 year old British pensioneer, a retired locksmith immobilized with grief. He hides in his house, despite the savory pastries left by a neighborhood do-gooder and has few other visitors. His son's in Australia and his daughter Lucy is distant.

When Lucy tells him it's time to clear out his wife's things, he stirs himself and is unexpectedly fascinated by the charm bracelet. He first examines a gold elephant with a glittering green eye and finds a phone number in India. He calls and learns his wife had been a nanny in India, beloved still by the man once her charge. He had never known she had traveled.

Pepper pursues the meaning of the other charms. His homebody grounded in routine was mysterious and exciting. She had mixed with exotic tigers, lords with harems, a famous poet, artists, French couture and other wonderlands. Searching her out, Pepper starts to see himself. Like Alice in the room with the key, who is first too big, then too small, he has to change to enter his wife's world.

Pepper becomes a risk-taking adventurer with the courage to face what happens. Whether robbed in the Tube, facing down tigers, sheltering with a street musician, or encountering a night of Parisian possibilities, Pepper follows his quest. He learns not just about his wife, but about himself. s Alice drinks her tea with the mad hatter amid broken clocks, Arthur Pepper embraces disconcerting unpredictable life, hidden behind the illusion of routine.

This sweet U.K. novel of life's possibility, at any age, is much the anecdote to the ageism so prevalent in U.S. culture. Arthur Pepper, like Alice, returns to his everyday world, where everything is changed and the same–a happy ending with a new beginning. I am glad books like this are being written. They make us think about discovery and self-knowledge, while in tumultuous times

S,W,