What's It All About?: A Novel of Life, Love & Key Lime Pie

Virtually plotless, this deliberately folksy novel, with its compact 5 1/2 x 6 1/2 format, aspires to be a chapbook of wizened aphorisms and homey truths. Hiram Walker, 79, president of a trailer park in Naples, Fla., is a retired insurance salesman from Ohio. When not boasting about his conquests of assorted widows or making a good side income dealing generic drugs, he spouts cracker-barrel philosophy about growing old, love, God, suicide, being single, the empty-nest syndrome, lying politicians, American history and everything else. Sometimes funny, sometimes touching, Hiram's homespun observations of fellow trailer-park residents alight on Caesar Medina, an ex-bullfighter from Mexico, and retired lawyer Cyrus Applebee, Hiram's bitter rival for control of the park. Hitting his head in a bad fall, Hiram hallucinates the ghost of his dead wife, Rose, with whom he converses about the afterlife. He flirts with Carole Dickerson, a black neighbor, and seduces Mrs. Mylapore, a dignified Indian widow from Calcutta. Though at times as cloying as the pies he bakes for park residents, Hiram's narrative rises to heights of fiercely defiant eloquence as he rages against the dying of the light, giving this little book some surprising heft. (July)