Plain Heathen Mischief

Plain Heathen Mischief

Of <i>The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living,</i> Martin Clark’s first novel, the <i>New York Times Book Review</i> wrote, “Like Nick Hornby in <i>High Fidelity</i> and Thomas McGuane in <i>Nothing But Blue Skies,</i> Clark has produced an oddly stirring portrait of a man in existential disarray.” Which–noted Malcolm Jones in <i>Newsweek–</i>“made me laugh so hard I fell off the sofa.”<br><br><i>Plain Heathen Mischief</i> ups the existential ante, as Joel King, a defrocked Baptist minister, finds life even more bedeviling once he’s served six months for a career-ending crime he might not even have committed. Now his incommunicado wife wants a divorce, the teenage vixen of his disgrace is suing him for a cool $5 million, a fresh start in Montana offers no hope for ex-cons of any religious persuasion, and the refuge provided by his sister turns as nasty as his parole officer.<br><br>Talk about a crisis of faith. On the upside, a solicitous member of Joel’s former congregation invites him into a scam that could yield some desperately needed cash, and soon the down-on-his-luck preacher is involved with a flock of charming con men, crooked lawyers, and conniving youth.<br><br>In a feat of bravura storytelling, Martin Clark ranges from the cross to the double cross, from Virginia to Las Vegas, from jail cells to trout streams, as he follows his Job-like hero through dubious choices and high-dollar insurance hustles to a redemption that no reader could possibly predict. Wildly imaginative, at times comic, at times profoundly sobering, and even more audacious than his wonderfully idiosyncratic debut, <i>Plain Heathen Mischief</i> is a spiritual revelation of the first order.