The Long Run of Myles Mayberry - Softcover

A frothy comic tale from Alcorn (Murder in the Museum of Man, 1997) about a feckless but determined Harvard grad training for the Boston Marathon on the marijuana-fogged streets of Cambridge in the 1970s. Imagine J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man in running shoes: Myles O'Malley Mayberry, a roguishly charming working-class Irish- American with a Harvard BA, a loving wife, and a business partner whose pie-in-the-sky schemes only lose money, decides that, though he's a failure at just about everything, he might as well put his life on hold to run over 100 miles a week for the next six months with the hope of winning the Marathon. On a lark, Mayberry ran it the year before and was satisfied then with just crossing the finish line. But at that time he was only 29 and his life was filled with promise: his buddy Victor Hennessey's idea of selling taped novels to radio stations seemed a winner, sex was good with his young bride Sophie, and he was even making progress learning how to speak Gaelic. But now, at 30, he finds the world of young, hard-drinking, pot-smoking upwardly mobile processionals to be shallow, corrupt, or plain dull. Hoping to put some spark back into their marriage, Sophie takes Myles to a ``quadriyogi'' retreat in New Hampshire, but Myles ducks out on both wife and flaky friends for a mountain run, knocks back applejack with a backwoods fella, and finds himself in bed, hours later, with the wrong woman. Sophie in turn takes off with Derek Fell, a gay poet friend, who turns out (surprise!) not to be gay. A reconciliation with Sophie ends when Myles insists on running instead of watching out-of-focus slides of his father-in-law's China trip. He gets a teaching job at a junior college diploma mill only to lose the post when he falls asleep in his classroom. These and other assorted pratfalls fail to keep him from the big race, however, where hell discover that although obsession can take him places, it's still nice to have a place to come back to. Light, literate Boomer nostalgia. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Part parody of 1970s excess, part paean to the art of running, this quirky novel focuses on hapless Myles Mayberry, who spends his days training for the Boston Marathon and smoking marijuana. Myles and his dismayed new wife, Sophie, the couple's sole financial support, live in Cambridge, where they are part of a New Age "therapeutic community." Having fallen into a "blinding, binding" love one year earlier, they are hitting their marriage's first rocky patch. All goes downhill when the couple attends a weekend retreat in New Hampshire with a swami and Myles sneaks away for an illicit run. Obsessed with his desire to win the Boston Marathon, Myles begins running twice a day, and only gradually realizes that Sophie is having an affair with bisexual poet Derek Fells. The couple separate, and Myles moves to an office at the school where he teaches business management (a field which he knows nothing about). He begins to experience episodes of amnesia, running in his sleep and waking up on unfamiliar Boston streets. Only by participating in the marathon and reconciling himself to the idea of losing can he recover Sophie and his sanity. This is an inoffensive and at times amusing portrait of American life in the years between the optimistic '60s and the self-absorbed '80s, distinguished by Alcorn's vibrant evocation of the addictive nature of running.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.