From Publishers Weekly
Take a trip with Alex Berry, the whiz-kid entrepreneur driven to become a major mogul in record time. In this exhaustively detailed tale, Berry turns from perfumed balls to an environmentally friendly sausage and fertilizer maker, the Humpty Dumpty Dumpster, for quick 'n' easy success. Venture capital arrives in the form of Rev. Jim Tickell, a man for whom religion and finance come tied in a neat knot. From there, Alex finds himself caught up in a web of politics, illicit romance, religion and, at times, wicked satire before the tale ends. Fink's prose is always colorful and intricately detailed, a trait that is fascinating as often as it is annoying. The author appears to have delusions of Pynchon, as in his unwanted description of the protagonist urinating in a sink: "The bowl of the sink was a shallow slope and his last squirt and dribble lacked the oomph to avoid sprinkling the sides with yeasty gold drops." And his narrative continues well beyond the actual story and long after the fates of both clergyman and would-be entrepreneur are sealed. Still, look out for Heidi Knauer, a hellacious hanger-on who wants her own piece of the pie. She might be worth a story all her own?which she spends much the book trying to convince the rest of this world's denizens.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Kirkus Reviews
Continuing to show the nervy, offbeat wit first seen in Further Adventures (1993), Fink here tackles a more ambitious subject--the power of televangelists and the commingling of commerce and religion--with far less success. Fresh from USC business school, entrepreneur Alex Berry has product ideas galore but no money. When plans for the ``Odo-bag,'' a portable sachet in a variety of scents, wither beneath the scorn of a potential investor, Alex comes back to earth, latching onto the design for a miracle machine: a down-home processor capable of turning compost into feed, paper into fuel, waste into fertilizer, and, most importantly, raw ingredients into sausage--all by using interchangeable parts. Named the Humpty Dumpster, it catches the eye of evangelist Jim Tickell, who has a reputation not only for wildly successful fund drives for his TV ministry but also for divine inspiration in picking business ventures. Poised to take over a rundown pig farm, JT sees in Alex's idea just what's needed to make another commercial killing, so the two become partners. At first the Dumpster and Hummingbird Farm sausages exceed expectations, but a critical sales pitch goes awry at a Sacramento revival meeting when carelessness causes pig feces to be ground into sausage sampled by Iowa pig farmers, laying them low. Meanwhile, JT's erratic behavior has so estranged him from his wife that she sleeps with Alex, and when an earthquake swallows the farm, JT vanishes, too, leaving Alex to take the heat for the tainted sausage. In time, Alex recovers enough to marry JT's now ex-wife and start a family, but fortune will smile less benignly on JT. Complex plotting and a detailed treatment of fundamentalist tenets make for heavy going, but they also create a provocative tale, leaving little doubt that this is a writer to be reckoned with. --
Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
