Confederates Stars and Bars

By Martha Duffy

When a waiter approaches Henderson Dores' table in a Manhattan restaurant and begins the "My name is James . . ." routine, Henderson jumps to his feet, pumps hands and introduces his companion. What this shy, attractive, self- critical Englishman wants is to look and feel like an American: "I want your confidence and purpose, I want your teeth and tans." But he cannot help hearing the hell raised by garbage trucks between 4 and 5 in the morning, cannot really swallow the harsher barbarities of New York fad cuisine ("fillet of hake in lager and cranberry sauce . . . roast baby pigeons in fresh grapefruit nests"). When city smarts are called for, Henderson loses his nerve. Convinced that he is being attacked on a dark street, he flings his wallet and credit cards to the sidewalk and injures his knees as he runs away. The "muggers" patiently gather up his documents and return them; they are four people coming home from the movies.

Dores is an impressionist expert at a London auction house who has been sent to New York to help increase business in that prestigious and lucrative field. In town just long enough to establish a ruinous double love life, he is ordered to the Deep South to close a deal for some Sisleys and Vuillards belonging to a crusty old patriarch named Loomis Gage. For Gage, read Snopes; Henderson is soon in far beyond his depths of courage or cunning with this moody, devious clan. The old man's fortune comes from some patents he took out on parking-lot design when he noticed cars on the road after World War I. Eventually the courts caught up with him, and dwindling reserves have forced the Gages into some rascally conniving and serious plans for the picture collection.

William Boyd, 33, who until recently taught at Oxford, brings considerable zest to this fluent, raucous, untidy narrative. He has written two previous novels--An Ice-Cream War, set in World War I, and A Good Man in Africa, a comedy that takes place in a former British possession. Both are more controlled and disciplined. Beside them, Stars and Bars is something of a hoot, based as much on the garbled America of TV as the real thing. Boyd is fine as long as he stays in New York City. In the South his story tends to unravel, and the picaresque incidents verge on cartoons. There are, however, some sharp observations of Dixie speech ("Each gnat she cooked me a fan dinner") and fauna ("a moth the size of a wren"), and an impudent send-up of atrium-style hotels, a high-rise in Atlanta where the guests go from check- in to elevator via canoe.

Because he is English and revels in satire, Boyd has often been compared to Evelyn Waugh. The comparison does not really work; he has neither Waugh's masterly style nor his free-floating malice. Also, when Waugh wrote his comic gems in the '20s and '30s, it was still possible to have a truly innocent hero, like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall or William Boot in Scoop. A dark half-century later, Boyd's Henderson Dores would not be believable as a pure man; he must be inept and pusillanimous. When last seen, he has lost his job and his women, and his life hangs on his ability to outrun a real attacker. So much, says Boyd, for the insufficiently corrupt.