Product Description
Ever reliable and responsible, Otis Halstead is a father, a husband (one half of a “well-dressed couple of substance”), and the CEO of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He has never done anything out of the ordinary. Until now.
The change in Otis starts with an antique toy fire truck, the exact model he had pined for at age ten but never received. Though it is now a collectible costing $12,350, he will buy it–because he can. Next comes a Daisy Red Ryder… More >>
5 responses to Eureka: A Novel
Otis Halstead, a quiet, competent, civic-minded CEO of a Kansas casualty and life insurance company in Eureka, Kansas, is a contentedly married father of a college-age daughter. Just three weeks short of his 60th birthday, he is visiting an antiques toy show when he is suddenly seized by a desire to pay $12,500 for a mint condition toy fire engine exactly like the one he didn’t get for his fifth Christmas.
Then, in a catalog on memorabilia, he spots a Red Ryder BB rifle complete with official BBs in its original carton. As soon as it arrives via FedEx Express, he hastily erects a target in the backyard and starts spending his free time pinging away at paper targets until he becomes a crack shot.
Next is an authentic Kansas City Chiefs football helmet that he begins to wear in public because it covers his bald head, making him look younger. By now his wife and friends are becoming concerned about his behavior, and when he disappears one Saturday and returns late that night towing a 1952 Cushman motor scooter on a trailer, that is when they insist he seek professional help. Otis reluctantly agrees to confer with Bob Gilroy, his best friend and a psychologist at a famed Eureka mental health clinic. Bob suggests that he talk to a specialist in “aging male syndrome,” but Otis observes that Dr. Tonganoxie is even stranger than he is and decides that the only way to cure his hunger for change is to run away from home.
And so it is that we accompany Otis aboard his red 1952 Cushman motor scooter on his own, within-the-speed-limit version of Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD. Jack Kerouac he is not — there are no pot parties or peeing off the back of freight cars in Otis’s journey to adventure. He does not awake after any orgies or with strange women in his bed. No doubt the wildest night is spent in a garage in Church Key Charlie Blue’s chocolate fudge factory along Kansas Highway 56, where Otis arrives, bruised and soaked to the skin after an accident in a rainstorm. There begins his odyssey to self-awareness, fraught with danger and pitfalls never encountered on the golf course or at his business man’s club.
Jim Lehrer, author of 16 prior novels, has constructed a warm, humorous and poignant story of a nice man who thinks he has everything and discovers that there is more to life than success.
— Reviewed by Roz Shea
Rating: 4 / 5
For Otis Halstead it’s an antique toy fire truck, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, a Kansas City Chief’s regulation NFL helmet and a 1952 Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter…and a yearning to escape the responsibilities of adulthood. For me, it’s a collection of handsigned studio photos of the cowboy stars I grew up with on the black and white screen, also a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, a Lone Ranger lunch box, a 1949 Ford pick-up truck and a sailboat in which to sail into the sunset. The difference is, Otis acts on his desire to shed the trappings of approaching senior citizen status while I, like probably most, refuse to take that risk. But the very story line, like William Least Heatmoon’s, Blue Highways of two decades ago shows man has maintained his yearning to escape, if only temporarily. This book is for the dreamer in all of us.
Rating: 4 / 5
Jim Lehrer’s Otis Halstead suffers the midlife crisis many of us are expecting. The difference is, he acts out all the impulses most of us suppress, which makes this fun for those who live vicariously through their reading. Full disclosure: I bought my bb gun when I turned 50.
The quiet, prosperous life of a Kansas insurance executive isn’t particularly scintillating. Otis breaks away from the humdrum sometime before his 60th birthday when he dons his KC Chiefs football helmet and putters off into the sunset on his motor scooter with his trusty bb gun strapped to the seat.
His adventures and mis-adventures make for a good rainy Sunday afternoon read.
Rating: 3 / 5
A wonderful book that tells the story of a middle age marriage as experienced by the man (for a change!). Otis Halstead has always played by the book. He has followed all of the rules of family and business, and, yet, something is missing. Could that missing piece be the red 1952 Cushman Pacemaker that he wanted when he was 10? The purchase of the scooter changes his life forever, but only after many and varied adventures that involve people he would never have met had he stayed in his “real” life. I laughed out loud and cried silently throughout this book. It is full of humor and grace and a message for one and all.
Rating: 5 / 5
The promotional material for this book made it sound great, but that’s because professionals write (and likely carefully edit) promotional material. Not so for this book. It’s clearly the work of an amateur writer. The writing is clunky (I guess it’s true that publishing houses have done away with editors), the characters are uninspiring, and the plotting is weak. Reading this book makes one realize that writing is difficult: not just anyone can do it. If the author were not a celebrity (of sorts), this ms. would never have been considered for publication. But the book does have one virtue: it’s short.
Rating: 1 / 5
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