Off the Bookshelf

Leading the Cheers

Carroll & Graf, 256 pp., $23.95

Sorry to be leading the jeers, but I did not find much to recommend about this dry novel. No doubt its protagonist, Dan Silas, a Brit in the throes of a midlife crisis, would sneer at my desire for sympathetic characters. Dan spends the course of the novel -- a visit to his high school reunion in rural Michigan -- skewing one hapless old pal after another. Unlike John Updike's Harry Angstrom, Cartwright's curmudgeon is not someone I wanted to be stuck with for 256 pages. To be sure, Dan does slow down by the end of the novel; he begins to see the glimmers of light in even the most gauche of his old friends, but for this reader, it was too little too late. Dan muses that "the burden is the belief that we are meant to be more than what we find ... we are more than this ... there must be more than this." Precisely.