BOOK REVIEW

        Cady, Jack.  _The Off Season:  A Victorian Sequel_.
        New York:  St. Martin's Press, 1995.  pp. 304.  Cloth,
        6" x 8-1/2".  $23.95.  ISBN 0-312-13574-2.

        Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

                Dennis W. Eddings
                [log in to unmask]
                Western Oregon State College
                Monmouth, OR 96731

        Copyright (c) Mark Twain Forum, 1995.  This review
        may not be published or redistributed in any medium
        without permission.

Jack Cady's _The Off Season_ offers the reader a wildly
improbable premise that, once accepted, leads to a wonderfully
good tale.  Part of Cady's artistry lies in his ability to make that
premise acceptable.  Judge for yourself:  When the first white
men arrived on what is now known as the Olympic Peninsula in
Washington state, the native Indians readily gave the white eyes
land on which to build their town, Point Vestal, for the Indians
knew that the land was cursed.  (Anyone who construes this
"generosity" as proof of the Indians' sagacity in putting one over
on the white man has begun to catch on to Cady's wicked
humor.)  The nature of the curse?  Point Vestal is subject to
"time jumps," meaning ghosts from the past may inhabit the
present.  And inhabit it they do.  Indeed, if one knows the way,
one can jump back into the past without benefit of a DeLorean
equipped with a flux capacitor.  As one character puts it, "The
key to Point Vestal . . . is that all the time is happening some of
the time" (41).  Past and present thus mingle freely in Point
Vestal, with outrageous results.  Since the original inhabitants
were quite literally Victorians (the town rose in the 1860s and
70s), and since those original inhabitants still are active
participants in the town, all that follows is indeed "A Victorian
Sequel."  Add to this mix a Presbyterian Parsonage that
changes its location at will (or whim), and the stage is set for
uncommon events.

Into this time unbound world comes Joel-Andrew, an
excommunicated Episcopalian minister, and his dancing, multi-
lingual cat, Obed, who can purr in Greek and becomes quite
proficient in Chinese as the book progresses.  Joel-Andrew is
more than an unfrocked preacher--he is a prophet and agent of
the lord.  He is also responsible for freeing August Starling, wife
killer, from the ghostly past, thus releasing evil into Point Vestal,
for Starling, we discover, is an incarnation of Satan.  The story
centers on Joel-Andrews' coming to knowledge of the nature of
Point Vestal, the nature of himself, and the true nature of good
and evil.  Indeed, the book climaxes in a literal battle between
good and evil as Joel-Andrew and Starling square off on Main
Street.  This grand battle is fraught with outrageously comic side
shows involving the U.S. Navy, talking porpoises, vindictive
whales, ducks flying in formation, and the airborne Presbyterian
Parsonage.

_The Off Season_ concerns more than Joel-Andrew, however.
It is also about the town and the efforts of five people who
gather together, twenty years later, to write the history of those
events in 1973-74 that led to the momentous battle between
Joel-Andrew and Starling.  They are writing "a true history and
not an official one" (34)--a distinction Twain would have liked
and understood.  In doing so they come to see that past and
present are inextricably connected and that the true curse of
Point Vestal is its own past.  The upright, moral, duty-bound
Victorians who created the town brought with them the same
double standard eloquently described in Stephen Marcus's
_The Other Victorians_.  In the midst of Victorian propriety
stand opium dens, houses of prostitution, smuggled Chinese
laborers who can be thrown overboard in a pinch, and a
thriving drug trade.  The corrupt present, then, is revealed to be
little more than an extension of a very corrupt past, as the
following, very Twainian, paragraph suggests:
        At Joel-Andrew's back, time jumps intensified, and
        while the time jumps were colorfully macabre, they
        were not unbeautiful before the music of the choir.  The
        crowd watched, and it seemed there was very little to
        repent.  Asian women wept above emaciated babies,
        while children lay with blackened hands and faces
        beneath the scorching scent of napalm.  Street kids
        rapped, gave each other high fives, or lay stoned and
        dying in doorways.  Disemboweled grandmothers,
        dressed in gaudy South American costumes, lay beside
        starved bodies of Africans, while oil rigs hovered in the
        far distance; and a babble of Middle Eastern languages
        argued above purring engines of Mercedes and
        Lincolns, above the exasperating cough of lungs burned
        by mustard gas.  (271)

But why is the Mark Twain Forum reviewing this book?  In his
"Author's Note," Cady states:
           Ever since I was a pup, I've been enamored with the
        works of Mark Twain.  The book that follows is not an
        attempt to emulate the master, because that would be a
        surefire failure, a real dumb thing to do; and I am not a
        masochist.  I had one thing foremost in mind when I
        wrote _The Off Season_.  I wanted to write a book
        that would gladden the hearts of readers, but also a
        book that, if possible from the land of wit and poetry
        where all great writers surely go, my hero Mark Twain
        would enjoy reading.
Cady has succeeded admirably on both counts.  This strikes me
as a logical place to end this review, but I suspect the critical
minds of Forum members will demand details.  The question
then becomes, why would Twain enjoy reading _The Off
Season_?  A full answer to that question would entail an
extensive essay, which this review is not.  Consequently a few
general observations, more suggestive than definitive, will have
to suffice.

One striking element of _The Off Season_ that Twain would
surely appreciate is Cady's masterful evocation of place.  Twain
incorporated physical setting as a significant player in his works
with great skill and wonderful eloquence.  Cady is no slouch in
this regard.  Anyone familiar with the Pacific Northwest
recognizes the place Cady describes, as well as the in-jokes
that go with that place--the rain, the damp, Seattle.  Indeed,
Cady uses that "nativeness" with the same panache found in the
best frontier humorists, who also deliberately exaggerated the
worst of a situation in order to laugh at it and those who
accepted common stereotypes about it.  Twain may not have
been too familiar with the Pacific Northwest (although he did
pass through on his round the world trip in 1895), but he would
certainly recognize Cady's technique in evoking and exploiting
place.

Cady also displays another Twainian talent--a wonderful ear for
language, including the ability to spin remarkably vivid, apt and
very frequently humorous similes.  One character sits "serene as
a robin on a nest"; Starling's march to success is "as surefooted
as a mouse on Swiss cheese," while his "darkly handsome"
visage is likened to "a friendly lawyer, or a solicitous used-car
salesman."  Cady also follows the Twainian manner of linking
words in comically incongruous yet appropriate remarks:  "She
showed plenty of grief and cleavage."  And Pudd'nhead Wilson
would have no trouble adding to his calendar, "in any given
population, a certain percent is born stupid and graceless.  The
worst of them go into politics."  Such listing could continue, for
this is a very rich book, but the basic point is that Cady's style
would undoubtedly earn a sympathetic, approving nod from
Mark Twain.

Perhaps the most Twainian aspect of _The Off Season_ resides
in the darkly humorous thrust of the tale itself.  Cady's unsparing
commentary on human foibles moves beyond humor into satire,
and that satire is at times as mordantly grim as any Twain has
given us.  Like Twain, Cady seems to have little use for
community officials.  Point Vestal's town fathers react to any
crisis by raising the sewage rates (a metaphor worth exploring).
They are also more than willing to sell out to the devil (literally in
this case) for profit.  The ministerial association, confronted by a
true incarnation of evil, can make no real decisions beyond
endorsing commonplaces such as motherhood.  Beyond such
social commentary, Cady's delineation of the nature of evil is
also resonant of Twain:  Evil "is a force generated by ignorance.
It is a totally powerful force that through history has used some
ugly tricks.  Evil is not weak" (238).  The darkness of ignorance
fuels evil:  "It was medieval, the stuff of witchcraft, of
Inquisitions, of bigotry and intolerance.  It was positive as the
ebony face of history, the blackly laughing face of dogma and
theocracy, the nighttime shine of satanic worship" (267--lines I
find highly reminiscent of _A Connecticut Yankee_).  I don't
wish to imply that all of _The Off Season_ is this dark, but like
Twain, Cady addresses some very significant issues within the
crux of his humorous tale-telling.

(As an aside, I suggest that Twain is not the only authorial
influence traceable in _The Off Season_.  Point Vestal's isolated
setting, with a dense forest at its back, is highly reminiscent of
"Young Goodman Brown," an idea furthered by the story's
focus on good and evil and Cady's own reference to "spectral
evidence" on p. 139.  Indeed, in many ways this book is as
Hawthornian as it is Twainian, a most intriguing link that is
worthy of extended exploration.  There is also a scene right out
of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," a story Twain would have
liked and understood, as the Sherburn incident in _Huckleberry
Finn_ makes clear.)

Other Twain resonances could be traced in _The Off  Season_,
but I leave that task to members of the Forum.  My hope is that
the above is sufficient to encourage Twainiacs to take up
Cady's book.  It is a very good read, and I especially
recommend it to those who are venturing forth to frozen
Chicago right after Christmas.  In the midst of the self-
congratulatory idiocy of MLA (excluding, of course, the
activities of the Mark Twain Circle and the American Humor
Studies Association), a book this sane offers most welcome
relief.