Improbable Fortunes

February 15, 2016
Price, a screenwriter who co-wrote Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, makes his fiction debut with an exuberant tale of a foundling cowboyâthink Tom Jones set in the still-Wild West. Vanadium is a moribund Colorado mining town populated by the "direct descendants of Butch Cassidy's Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a naturally suspicious and xenophobic lot." An abandoned child, Buster McCaffrey, is rescued by the kindly town sheriff and shuttled among various Vanadium households when each of his foster fathers meet unfortunate ends. The seemingly cursed Buster is slow-witted, ingenuous, romantic, and fundamentally good-natured, a central character around whom the town's entertaining eccentrics, grotesques, benefactors, and love interests revolve. His picaresque travels from adoptive family to family, during which time he undergoes mini-apprenticeships as a tile-maker, concrete mixer, rodeo cowboy, and rancher, are briskly recounted until Buster falls in with a new father figure, Marvin Mallomar, a vacationing multimillionaire so taken with the refreshingly rustic Vanadium that he decides to build a luxurious compound there. As Mallomar uses Vanadium "as a palette for his frustrated creativity," his money floods the town, disastrously and somewhat literally. (The novel begins with a mudslide descending on Vanadium from his estate.) Some comic characters are more unconvincingly drawn than others, and Prince awkwardly shoehorns the mortgage crisis into the story, but on the whole the novel winningly animates a remote boomtown whose inhabitants have never had to struggle to keep it weird.

January 15, 2016
Wildly comic effusions involving millionaires, cattle ranchers, and other citizens of a small Colorado mining town. The novel opens with, literally, a rush--a wall of mud slams down the hillside, destroying a 40,000-square-foot house and several people in its path. Among those fortuitously not killed are Buster McCaffrey, one of Vanadium's resident cowboys, and Dana Mallomar, who's having an affair with Buster behind the back of her husband, Marvin, an affluent businessman. We then back up more than 20 years, to the mysterious circumstances surrounding Buster's birth amid a howling snowstorm. Mother dead in childbirth and father having disappeared even earlier, Buster is farmed out to a series of dysfunctional families--so dysfunctional, in fact, that he soon learns that Cookie Dominguez, one of his foster brothers, is blithely trying to kill him. As he grows up, Buster retains a fundamental innocence and honesty rarely found within the confines of Vanadium (even though the townspeople think he's responsible for the deaths of several of his foster fathers). One way Price chronicles Buster's naivete is through elaborate dialect, e.g., "Jiminy Christmas, what've ah done did?" Early on Buster falls in love with Destiny Stumplehorst, who inconveniently (or perhaps conveniently) is a daughter in one of his foster families. Even later, when Destiny becomes a drug addict, Buster retains a kind of pure love for her. Meanwhile, Marvin Mallomar sees both purity and potential in Vanadium, and he moves there with his seductive wife, Dana. And if these personal complications are not enough, hypermasculine cowboy Jimmy Bayles Morgan, who's there on the night of Buster's birth, and Sheriff Shep Dudival, whose historical memory helps re-create much of the story, help complete the ensemble. The comedy here is broad, farcical, and frequently forced--more amusing to the author, perhaps, than to the reader.

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