FOREST THINGS

During the day, Til Sharkis serves as a handyman for an Adirondack resort lodge. At night, however, he melds into Nature--cavorting with the forest and the elements; running in the dark down Mount Tilima (after which he was named by a father who disappeared when Til was ten); singing fearlessly at a rummaging bear; playing banjo into the air; and bringing fleshly relief to the lodge's widow landlady, one of the vacationers, an adolescent girl, and finally the wife of a town shopkeeper. The man is, as they say, a Force. And Nature forfend that you should forget it, so DiPego sets his central rhetorical question in neon: Who is more threatening to the repressed sexuality and encrusted civilization of the vacationers--the bear or Til? In DiPego's hands, the question is one of momentous, breathy triviality. Like With a Vengeance (1977), this tale of natural man vs. wicked society is a slice of thick, lurid baloney.