Recent reads

Listen, Moon!, by Leonard Cline. Cline's second novel, after God Head, is a relatively light and fluffy comic novel about a somewhat stuffy, recently widowed professor of classics who discovers that life does, after all, extend beyond the borders of his library and his school. A runaway debutante, an eccentric philanthropist, a rakish newspaper reporter, a beauteous housekeeper, and a copy of Treasure Island all figure into the tale. Not to mention a secondhand fishing schooner, moonshiners, a bullying preacher, a romantic-minded Southern judge, a dilapidated small town jail, and the Ku Klux Klan. Also, a cannon and a gaudy assortment of piratical costumes. And a treasure map.

It starts somewhat slowly, but by the time the principal characters set sail down the inlets of Chesapeake Bay in their secondhand schooner with the avowed purpose of becoming twentieth-century pirates, it's become a delightful farce. The romantic pairings don't necessarily work out predictably -- Cline is too clearsightedly pragmatic for that -- but believably.

My desultory research on Cline, and correspondence from one or two wiser heads than my own, indicate that he worked for a time in Baltimore under the aegis of H.L. Mencken. Certainly a degree of familiarity with the environs of that city is evident here, as is, perhaps, a trace of Mencken's sharpfanged wit added to Cline's own evident love of myth and the influence that it has on human lives. It doesn't have the powerful, unified dramatic punch of his first novel, but like the backwaters of the Chesapeake, it eddies and wanders about in an affably amusing fashion.