COUNTING COUP

Struggling almost from the first page to find its speed, this ungainly road-trip novel is burdened with clichés and redundancies, and stumbles along under the weight of stillborn characters until it finally sputters to a halt. Charlie Sarris, an itinerant handyman, is a 60-something veteran of WWII suffering from alcoholism and depression. Toothless and emphysemic, he encounters John Stone, an itinerant Sioux (maybe) medicine man who introduces him to the spiritual world of Indian religion. John persuades Charlie to join him in a vision quest, which involves a sweat lodge ceremony, during which John is confronted by his archenemy, Whiteshirt, a rival shaman, who then spiritually pursues the pair in a wild, drunken chase down the eastern seaboard, where the novel grinds to a nervous halt in a series of highly coincidental and improbable events. Vagueness of setting (Pennsylvania, New York?) and era ('60s, '70s, '80s?) cause frustration, and few plot lines are sustained for more than two or three pages. Contrivance—beaches are furnished with both working airplanes and handy twigs—is coupled with inconsistency in the presentation of the characters' main traits, and the confusion of internal thought with spoken dialogue produces an implausible narrative. The Indian lore is thin (and specious) and becomes tedious and repetitive early on. This is an ambitious effort that could have incorporated magical realism and mystical notions into a gritty quest to discover the value of life, à la Kerouac and Steinbeck, the two models Dann (The Man Who Melted, etc.) acknowledges in an afterword. Unfortunately, it becomes an endurance test for the reader, who must follow two poorly realized characters as they struggle to make a confused story meaningful. (Nov. 29)