Improbable Fortunes

Price, a screenwriter who co-wrote Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, makes his fiction debut with an exuberant tale of a foundling cowboy%E2%80%94think Tom Jones set in the still-Wild West. Vanadium is a moribund Colorado mining town populated by the "direct descendants of Butch Cassidy's Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a naturally suspicious and xenophobic lot." An abandoned child, Buster McCaffrey, is rescued by the kindly town sheriff and shuttled among various Vanadium households when each of his foster fathers meet unfortunate ends. The seemingly cursed Buster is slow-witted, ingenuous, romantic, and fundamentally good-natured, a central character around whom the town's entertaining eccentrics, grotesques, benefactors, and love interests revolve. His picaresque travels from adoptive family to family, during which time he undergoes mini-apprenticeships as a tile-maker, concrete mixer, rodeo cowboy, and rancher, are briskly recounted until Buster falls in with a new father figure, Marvin Mallomar, a vacationing multimillionaire so taken with the refreshingly rustic Vanadium that he decides to build a luxurious compound there. As Mallomar uses Vanadium "as a palette for his frustrated creativity," his money floods the town, disastrously and somewhat literally. (The novel begins with a mudslide descending on Vanadium from his estate.) Some comic characters are more unconvincingly drawn than others, and Prince awkwardly shoehorns the mortgage crisis into the story, but on the whole the novel winningly animates a remote boomtown whose inhabitants have never had to struggle to keep it weird. (Mar.)