VACATIONLAND

by Christopher Corbett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1986

Down-east, cracker-barrel humor about an imaginary county in rural Maine and all the colorful folks who live there. Mr. Chick Devine, owner of the ""Chick Devine Fun O'Rama,"" considers himself an eminent professional in ""the field of family fun,"" though the reader knows that this is the field, really, of weaseling money out of suckers. When a Fun O'Rama customer gets thrown off the Flying Disc one night and ""through a plate-glass window,"" the carnival leaves town quickly and goes--to avoid further trouble--to obscure Abenaki County, Maine. Once there, adventure after adventure. The carnival's giant lobster is stolen by two naive characters whose ""lives. . .were dedicated to saving the whale, braking for animals, getting Uncle Sam's hands off Central America and splitting wood, not atoms""; Chick Devine and his dubiously qualified friend Lee Berlitz mount a musical comedy ""based on Benedict Arnold's march across Maine"" and entitled ""The Boys in the Bateaux""; Devine sets up a mail-order course to qualify city-dwellers, in the comfort of their own apartments, as Maine Guides (in a subsequent hunting expedition, the proprietors ""lose"" five New Jersey state troopers in the woods, never to be found); and, to top it all, there is the Maine Event, ""a celebration of real Maine Life,"" a culmination of carnival high-jinks and dubious entrepreneurship that results, once again, in Mr. Devine's moving on. If you can stand the long stretchers (there is an epidemic of ""coyoons,"" cross between coyote and raccoon), the often insubstantial jokes (""The vegetarian puppeteers Octa and Terza Rima, who run the improvisational vegetable street-theater in Cambridge, the Biodegradable Ensemble, have agreed to come here to Cape Squab for the summer""), and the weary verbal corn (""And so it is that I cannot tarry long here. . .when there are those abroad who would seek to apply measures of tar and feathers to my person""), this is slight, skillful, and sometimes funny entertainment.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION