Horace Afoot (review)

drug abuse, the infighting over which managerial sharks would earn the most money from the Beatles' success, and the Lennon-McCartney rift that preceded the breakup of the band. Although the McCarrney-MUes version of the truth is surely incomplete and self-serving from time to time, the book is a corrective to much of the previous journalism about the Beatles. McCartney concedes that at the height of his popularity, he often Ued to journalists, who were so hungry for a story that they rarely bothered to discover the truth: "We often used to say to journalists, 'Look, I haven't got time for the interview , just make it up.' So some of ifs arrived that way . . . You know, if ifs a good story, it sticks. Or we may have felt Uke joking that day. Ifs summer and you're in a pub having a drink and there's a guy with a Uttle book and he's going 'yayayayaya/ so to alleviate the pressure we started to try to plant lies to the press. We used to award each other points for the best story printed ... It was wonderful because it turned it aU around and the press stopped being a pressure and became a fun game. They didn't mind. Anything to fui a page." Those lies have been passed along by later journalists, until the Beatles' legend has become just that—a legend. Future biographers wiU be able to use Many Years From Now as a starting point for separating reality from myth. (SW) Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss MacMurray & Beck, 1997, 278 pp., $25 This quietly comic first novel foUows the intellectual and pedestrian Odysseys of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace, for short) about the small Midwestern town of ObUvion. The town's residents aren't sure what to think about the curious newcomer . Horace is nothing short of eccentric: he changes his name repeatedly to the names of various admired philosophers, wanders ceaselessly about town on foot and makes frequent random phone calls to unsuspecting residents, gathering opinions on everything from St. Bernards to the meaning of love. Though he wants little more than to be left to his thoughtful musings and occasional good bottle of wine, Horace unwittingly becomes involved in many a local adventure, the most significant of which places him on a list of suspects in a brutal rape. A young woman stumbles, bound and naked, out of a remote cornfield as Horace is ambling past an old Indian mound. Wanting to avoid the suspicions of local law enforcement officials, Horace nevertheless finds himself drawn to the woman, Sylvia, whose Ufe, he discovers, is a series of desperate acts spun out of control. Jolted into the ordo amoris by a shared intimate experience with her, Horace agrees to finance Sylvia's escape from a jealous boyfriend and from Oblivion. At the same time, Horace has unintentionaUy befriended the local Ubrarian, Mr. Mohr, who is dying of cancer. By the novel's end, Horace has been touched intimately by these two relationships. One can't help 188 · The Missouri Review feeling that he has changed from the fiercely independent observer who first arrived in ObUvion to a man who appreciates the value of human contact. Alternating between moments of quaint wit and probing philosophy , Horace Afoot will delight the patient reader who realizes that Horace's seemingly misguided wanderings are a direct path to a greater understanding of human intimacy. 0O) Straight Man by Richard Russo Random House, 1997, 391 pp., $25 The place is an undistinguished college in Pennsylvania, the month is April, the time of paranoia among academics. Threatened by impending purge, even of tenured members, the faculty is in the tumult of offensive self-defense. Everybody is either fiUng a grievance or threatening to file one. The good are saying they'U walk away whUe the mediocre are feverishly guarding their crumbling territory. Russo's new novel, about the misadventures of an EngUsh department chairman, begins with our hero's nose slashed and bleeding. A colleague, outraged in a committee meeting, throws a spiral notebook at rum, hooks him in the nose, then tries to snatch it back and rips his nostril...