AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY: A NOVEL OF QUILLIFARKEAG, MAINE by G.K. Wuori,

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, New York, 2000, $22.95.

A sizeable nugget of reality usually is found gleaming at the heart of most novels. Fiction they may well be, but the Great American Novels, such as Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” are in many ways more insightful portraits of their times than you are likely to find in textbook history. It is best, however, if you do not bring such hopes to this rather odd and surely fanciful novel of a certifiably fictional Maine community.

This is not to say you won’t be entertained. Wuori’s imagery is sprightly and most certainly original. His message, which becomes clear only as you near this bizarre tale’s conclusion, is most certainly worthy. And his eccentricities are genuine – there can be no doubt about that. His character and place names are off the wall throughout. Indeed, the consistency of their off-the-wallness is one of this small-town story’s hallmarks.

There’s Quillifarkeag itself, a limited community by any standard, somewhere off in this state’s unorganized territories 100 miles or so north of Bangor. Its town icon is an abandoned Nike missile, ” kept washed and waxed to an alabaster gleam by certain veterans groups …” It is the site of Mayor Hobadopp’s annual Memorial Day speech (always the same one) and also a monument to the book’s persistent quirkiness.

Hobadopp, by the way, is but one of the more quirky names. There’s the Pappidapsikeag River, Splotenbrun Doll (the narrator) also known as Splotchy, a man named Fendamius (Poison) Gorelick, Val Dooble, Pistelle

Philomene, and (my favorite) a child called Bylaws. The names of the principals, however, are as plain as potatoes. There’s Joe, married to Ellen, whose best friend is Wilma, who is this novel’s hero. She is the “good” who battles implacable “evil”, as played by Cary, a female police officer. Each of the protagonists meets, from time to time, at Bud’s Bar, a physical saloon (the town’s only one) and the metaphysical soul of Quillifarkeag.

It is, fittingly for Maine, an incident with a mortally sick moose that initiates the series of events that leads to the story’s violent conclusion. Ellen, having separated from Joe, lives a wood sprite’s life at a tumble-down shack so far back in the deep woods it almost does not exist. She shoots the moose, an undeniable mercy killing, but the bullet from her rifle travels across time and space, far beyond her enchanted forest, and lops off the little finger of one of three male layabouts who are spending the afternoon drinking as much beer as they can hold. Like each of the multitude of Maine images the author sketches, the shooting scene is uniformly shabby. Except for Ellen and Wilma, the backwoods Downeasters you meet in these pages are close relatives of the better-known Beans of Maine or Erskine Caldwell’s Jeeter Lester. They are without redeeming features, except perhaps for their authentic primitivism.

Do not despair, however. Wuori can write, no doubt about it. And, as you’ll discover once you get past his rather rank view of rural Maine, this is a morality tale as poignant as “Gulliver’s Travels” or “The Scarlet Letter.” It is a high-frequency protest against brutality, fascism and the violent destruction of innocence. It also is a novel laced with more and better epigrams than most are likely to read or have read, with sentences such as: “It’s easy to fill your life with rules when your life is building things,” or, “Is there anything more repulsive that one person can say to another than ‘I know what you’re going to say’?”

This is what saves this book: its cleverness, its firm grip on humor – humor that surprises throughout. It doesn’t have laugh-out-loud jokes. It’s a wry, deft humor. The humor of the human comedy, which, when you stop to consider, is an ironic triumph for Wuori.

His tale is an all-out tragedy, in the most classic sense. The good folks are doomed from the start. All but one.