THE FINGERPRINTS OF ARMLESS MIKE

Much ado about precious little in the old-money suburbs, which Simpson (Full Moon Over America, 1994; The Gypsy Storyteller, 1993) has walked us through before. This time, the geography is extended a bit. Mike Standish is pretty seriously adrift. When we meet him, he is on the lam in the Caribbean, holed up on a little spit of sand called the Devil's Cay after successfully burgling his mother-in- law's house and fleeing the country. Mike's real name is Standowski, not Standish, but he changed that when he left his working-class Poughkeepsie home for Ithaca College. There, his preppie roommate, Graham Cramer, introduced Standish to high society by inviting him for holidays to Treetops, his family's lavish estate in New Jersey horse country, where Standish took to the scenery so well that he ended up marrying Cramer's very rich sister-in-law Sarah Browne. Although he has now started a career of sorts as a photographer, his standing as a social upstart suspected of marrying for money prompts Standish to take a job in the family firm, a real-estate business that turns out to be involved in a variety of unsavory deals—and that becomes his real initiation into the world of money (``If I was a crook, I reminded myself in way of justification, then I was by no means the only one. Oh no, those affluent hills were crawling with crooks of the white-collar variety''). As Standish's resentment of his in-laws begins to force a crisis, he finds himself simultaneously being drawn deeper into a world of genuine criminality. The circumstances leading to his flight are described obsessively, though it must be said that they can hardly account for his path in the end. The climax is a hurricane that comes, suitably enough, out of nowhere. Sound and fury: basically a modest story given the treatment of an epic tragedy. Unlikely to convince. (Author tour)