Serendipity Green - Hardcover

Rob Levandoski lives on his family's farm in Hinckley, Ohio. He is a veteran writer and book critic. His first novel, Going to Chicago, was published by The Permanent Press in 1997.

A hideous home-brewed housepaint has unpredictable consequences for the daft residents of a small Ohio town thats preparing for its annual tourist event, in this second midwestern gothic from Levandoski (Going to Chicago, 1997). Lawyer D. William Aitchbone, aspiring Republican power-broker of tiny Tuttwyler, Ohio, will let nothing stop him from making this summer's Squaw Days festival the best ever. As the festival's new chairman, Aitchbone (who sees the festival as a launching pad for his political career) is yanking every string he can grab to have the US vice president ride in the annual parade and possibly even judge the pie-eating and tobacco-spitting contests. But should a vice president have to see the drab, unpainted two-story clapboard house of Howard Dornick, the illegitimate son of the town's only war hero? Aitchbone decides to threaten Dornick, the city's maintenance man, with job privatization; as a result, Dornick buys the cheapest paint he can find, mixes in assorted household cleaning fluids, lubricating oils and antifreeze, and slathers on an eye-searing shade of green that contrasts violently with the prim, pearly white Victorians facing the town square. Levandoski's deliberately trite metaphor for the shock of the new has residual effects: spinster librarian Katherine Hardihood falls in love with Dornick and, during a visit to the festival (a tacky sham that celebrates the murder of an Indian princess and her child by Tuttwylers founding fathers, and the princess's ghostly forgiveness of the crime), clinically depressed New York commercial color-consultant Hugh Harbinger sees gold in what he trademarks as Serendipity Green. From here on, Levandoski takes his farce down paths less familiarand less assured. We learn that the town's conflicted personalities are linked to a motormouth Iranian psychiatrist, Pirooz Aram; that a melodramatic secret lurks in a forgotten grave; and that an assassin lurks among the parades cheering sightseers. A funny, if formulaic, send-up of heartland hypocrisy slowly ripens into a more interesting but less coherent observation of America's failure to slow down and smell the roses, whatever color they may be.-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.