YANKEE DIDDLE DANDY

By R.Z. Sheppard

Harvey Jacobs' American Goliath (St. Martin's; 346 pages; $24.95) celebrates the long and glorious tradition of deception with an inspired novel based on the 1869 Cardiff Giant hoax.

The fun began the year before, when George Hull, a prosperous Binghamton, N.Y., cigar manufacturer, was roused to mischief by a clergyman who preached that the U.S. was the true setting for Genesis. Happily for Hull, the imaginative minister was fond of scriptural quotes like, "There were giants in the earth in those days." So the tobacconist hired a shady Chicago sculptor to turn a block of gypsum into a 10-ft. Goliath, which was shipped to a relative's farm in Cardiff, N.Y., for burial. After a year of underground seasoning, the figure was "discovered," and Cousin Stubby's farm became a combination Lourdes and sideshow. Suckers and scholars (not always distinguishable) lined up to pay a dollar a peek.

That this profane creation could have been mistaken for a calcified Superman with a biblical pedigree evokes patronizing chuckles today. But Jacobs, an undersung writer (Beautiful Soup, The Egg of the Glak and Other Stories), treats bunkum and hypocrisy as endearingly ambivalent national traits. Unsurprisingly, his all-time champion of this view is P.T. Barnum, who at one point tells General Tom Thumb that "our mission is to startle and amuse, to make our audience pay too much for too little and forget to hang us from the nearest lamppost."

Barnum is one of the more honest characters in Jacobs' conflation of fact and fiction. In effect, the legendary showman leads a kind of geek chorus of real and imagined religious zealots, yellow journalists, gangsters and robber barons. The Wall Street rogue Jay Gould actually sells someone a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge. A Jewish peddler leaves the fold to become a dowser for parched anti-Semites. Hull changes the name of a new cigar from Pickaninny to Uncle Tom after hearing that black smokers might be offended.

Times have changed, but Jacobs' bawdy romance demonstrates that enduring comedy springs from deep-seated anxieties. That theme sounds throughout American Goliath, which embodies both the aggressive energies unleashed in the late 19th century and the timeless need for justifying illusions.

For the record: The original Cardiff Giant is on permanent display at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. That fact contains an extra-literary, though no less poetic, irony. Across town, at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, there is a plaque that sheepishly admits Abner Doubleday did not invent the game. At the same time, its text seems to suggest that a little mythology is not a bad thing. Just don't pay too much for too little.

--By R.Z. Sheppard