Cooler by the Lake - Softcover

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.

In spite of a preoccupation with large breasts, sex, and urination (or perhaps because of it), National Book Award winner Heinemann ( Paco's Story , LJ 12/86) has produced an entertaining story of an encounter between rich and poor. Small-time schemer Maximilian Nutmeg lives in a large house with his zaftig wife, senile mother, ex-stripper-and-now-jello-wrestler sister and her lover, a daughter and her lover, nieces and nephews, and several cats and ferrets. He currently earns a living by grifting gas money from downtown Chicagoans. On one foray, he finds a wealthy woman's wallet and spends several days trying to return it to her. Heinemann punctuates the text with parenthetical comments on the origin of Chicago streets and landmarks, by which the one-time famous are reduced to obscurity and Chicago becomes almost a character in the book. Unfortunately, the story's ending is abrupt, which reduces a stylish and promising novel to a long character sketch. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.