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These Gospels Flame Out

© Robert Powers

Mike Magnuson made a spectacular debut with his 1997 novel, The Right Man for the Job, which has now been issued in a trade paperback edition by HarperFlamingo.

At the same time, Magnuson's second novel appears in hardcovers. The Fire Gospels (HarperCollins, $24) suffers from an almost fatal case of the sophomore jinx. I think the term originated in baseball, when promising rookies would have a terrific first season in the big leagues, then falter severely the following year. Unfortunately, that's the fate suffered by Magnuson, a Wisconsin native who teaches creative writing at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The Right Man for the Job had a compelling narrative that captured the plight of the lower middle class to a T. With humor and a deep understanding of what's it's like to be on the bottom rung of life, Magnuson told the story of a man working as a collector for a shoddy rent-to-own dealership in Columbus, Ohio.

Magnuson's latest, however, deals with a drought in a small Wisconsin town that eventually leads to a devastating fire. The story centers on Grady McCann, who enjoys his work as a maintenance man in a nursing home, but outside his job, life is a disaster area. He's married to a woman whose religious beliefs clash with his, especially in areas of wifely duties in the bedroom. The wife, meanwhile, is an assistant to TV weatherman Leroy Littlefield, who becomes a religious prophet in taking advantage of the lack of rain on the community his TV station serves.

Grady fears his wife is having an affair with Leroy. When the hapless Grady meets a college girl in his favorite bar, his clumsy attempt at a pass ignites a series of increasingly improbable events in a novel overwritten, overwrought and laughingly apocalyptic.

Mike Magnuson, who seemed charming and clever when I interviewed him last year, unquestionably has talent. But The Fire Gospels is a serious misstep, a book best avoided.

The HarperCollins web site is at www.harpercollins.com.

LOW-BUDGET HARDBACKS

Now here's a great idea: Hardcover fiction at roughly the price of a trade paperback. Watermelon (Avon, $15.95) is the first novel from Marian Keyes, a 35-year-old native of Limerick, Ireland.

Aimed at women readers, who made up the largest segment of the bookbuying public, the book details what happens with the 29-year-old heroine whose husband leaves her on the day she gives birth to their first child. Stuck in London while her mate pursues a woman living in the same apartment building, Claire does what many would do. She goes home to Dublin, to a mother addicted to watching soap operas, her out-of-it father and two sisters still living at the family homestead.

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