'A Bittersweet look back'
Cynthia Akers
Thursday, December 13, 2007
“”Eureka”” by Jim Lehrer, New York, Random House, 2007, $24.95.
Especially at this time of the year, who among us hasn’t yearned for the toy truck, Barbie doll, G.I. Joe action figure, or other item that we just knew would be waiting for us under the Christmas tree? And in the age of eBay when a memory can be purchased for often a very high price, is there any guarantee that one’s childhood can be recaptured happily?
Jim Lehrer, the executive editor and anchor of PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, captures these adult yearnings in his latest novel, “Eureka.” Lehrer still holds to his Kansas heritage and in this novel. He uses the Kansas town name of Eureka as a metaphor for discovery adventure, and a bittersweet look back at the choices we make in our lives.
Otis Halstead, chief executive officer of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty, has grown up always doing “the right thing.” On the night of his high school graduation, his father is killed in an accident returning to the house to retrieve a camera. Otis chooses to specialize in insurance after seeing the financial and emotional consideration paid to his mother by the Kansas Central Fire and Casualty company. He attends the University of Kansas, marries out of love and a sense of obligation and settles in Eureka to run the insurance company and serve his community.
Everything changes, though, when Otis sees a pristine fire engine complete with two miniature firemen at the Great Prairie Antiques Show. To the puzzlement of his wife, he buys the toy and explains that it was the one toy he wanted most as a child. This purchase is the catalyst that winds up with “Otis the Responsible” riding around Eureka on a red Cushman 1938 Deluxe Auto-Glide scooter, wearing an official Kansas City Chiefs helmet.
Despite the pleas of his wife and daughter and the intervention of a psychiatrist, Otis takes off one day on his Cushman scooter and encounters a series of characters out of the Southern fiction of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. An accident with his beloved scooter sends him to the hospital, where he pretends to be in a coma while plotting yet another escape from what has become a predictable, stale life.
Lehrer obviously had fun writing “Eureka,” and one of the hidden treasures is the use of various Kansas town names as the last names of characters throughout the novel. The ending may not satisfy everyone, but its ambiguity is somehow appropriate for Otis Halstead’s uncertain future.
Pick up “Eureka” for both an entertaining read and a thoughtful consideration of our literal and figurative roads not taken, with or without a Cushman scooter.
F “On the Shelf” is written by staff and volunteers of the Emporia Public Library.