TOWNIE

The motives are murky, but an oddly moving chemistry results when a homeless man on a decades-old quest and an eccentric multimillionaire join forces in a quaint but upscale Massachusetts town.

The pressures of development on the historically rich town of Oldon may be conventional, but the meeting of minds that occurs there is everything but: Urged mostly by reasons he can’t explain (but also by the coming winter), the 50-year-old seeker leaves his teepee in the woods and, one Halloween, walks into Arthur Worthy’s garish palace on the hill, where the rich man lives alone, to find himself instantly enmeshed in Arthur’s exotic life. The seeker having now been dubbed “Theo,” the two men (between Theo’s shining Arthur’s shoes and preparing the meal he’s going to offer—its purpose being seduction—to a lonely neighborhood housewife) talk, and each reveals his life’s defining moment. Theo’s occurred when he was ten: he’d become smitten with a girl, Anna, over the course of a play they were both in, and he was left just looking at her; Arthur’s was a car wreck on a backcountry English road that left him, when he was 26, on the brink of death and gave him the love of Anna, his now-estranged wife. Curiously, the Anna in each case is the same person. That bond established, Arthur concocts a role for Theo as a backer in his latest mega-deal, then drags him to England to hoodwink a couple of other would-be investors. The deal goes awry at the last minute, when schmoozing and boozing puts Arthur and one of the investors in the hospital. But out of the confusion Arthur finds something he’d been looking for without knowing it, and Theo finds sufficient closure to take his own search to a new level.

The revelations are more engaging than the business bluster, since the offbeat characters are the real story in this newcomer’s saga of fulfillment never quite distinguished from enrichment.