Oldcat and MS Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me

It is difficult to guess what prompted first-novelist Taylor to invent the almost unreadable language in which he has written this book. The format is conventional enough: it's an episodic, fable-like ""book of days"" that traces a week in the life of a middle-aged Southern couple. But the stilted, ungrammatical prose first occasions confusion and soon major irritation. On the first page: ""Oldcat suspect he hired cause Timely president remember him from Florida's BIG GAME #8 against Florida State.... So job he take."" There seems no reason for the college-educated protagonist's determination to avoid standard English: he moves from life as a campus football hero to a career as an engineer and then an executive for an American high-tech company that eventually is bought out by a Japanese company. As an executive, he graduates from the challenges of corporate life to reluctantly dealing with the changes brought about by a diversified workplace, meanwhile trying to juggle the demands of raising a family and supporting his wife's efforts to get a nursing degree. Between accounts of his mundane middle-class life, Oldcat waxes romantic about the wilder days of his youth and reflects on the changes in both the world around him and his own attitudes as he and his spouse move toward midlife. Taylor, who is the director of Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama and has published stories in literary magazines, is not without intelligence and a modicum of talent, and some of his character's musings might be entertaining if they were rendered in more easily comprehensible prose. (May)