The Dog-Nose Chronicles: A Sporting Novel

Rambling, full of annoying prose tricks and sometimes just plain silly, Hauptman's debut traces the rise and fall of an Ivy League-educated outdoorsman named Westlake Coleridge ""Dog Nose"" Cooper, whose skills as a guide become the stuff of legend. The saga opens with Dog Nose's death, a tall tale told in a mildly intriguing folksy voice that establishes the somewhat Bunyanesque scope of the protagonist's outdoor skills. From there, however, backwoods charm rapidly slides into affectation as Hauptman traces the growth of Dog Nose's guide business and his subsequent rise to prominence via a series of phony articles and letters placed in outdoor magazines. What passes for a plot thereafter is a series of chapters in which the author chronicles Dog Nose's relentless libido and outlines his conflict with a group of violent environmentalists, closing each chapter with an awful parody of a bad poem. The variations on this theme are even worse, particularly the muddled yarn that presents the macabre perspective of another fly fishing legend named ""Meyer the Teyer."" The surprise ending, in which the first-person narrator's identity is revealed, might have been intriguing were it not written in a faux-Joycean style that presents a stylistic jolt when compared with the rest of the proceedings. The book's sole saving grace are the technically oriented fishing passages, which reflect an obvious reverence for the sport. (June)