On the first page of Mike Heppner's second novel, Pike's Folly, we're introduced to the "excitable man", Rhode Island tycoon Nathaniel Pike. Pike employs what could be either alert pragmatism, intentional shiftiness, or downright sleaze—depending upon one's perspective. He finishes a sentence with "...and I say that to you as a fellow Republican." Informed that his partner in conversation isn't a Republican, he quickly shifts course with "Oh. Then I say that to you as a fellow Democrat." This is a nod, perhaps, to the Joseph Heller of Good As Gold. Indeed, a few pages further in, we learn that another character with attachments to Pike is reading Heller.

This is an interesting technique: both acknowledging the master and having the character acknowledging him, at the same time, and it immediately activated my radar to be on the lookout for more (I believe we see more, later, in regards to Phillip Roth and Richard Yates). This is just one of the numerous, rich multilayerings Heppner uses, with the result that the novel is infinitely flexible to many different types of readings and interpretations. Just as there are kinds of writers, there are kinds of readers, and there's something for everyone in Pike's Folly. Roland Barthes once wrote a 150-page book about a story of Balzac's that is just thirty pages long, and we can easily imagine Heppner's new work accomodating a similar project. This book is highly enjoyable precisely because it could be read at simple face value, for wonderful entertainment, or analyzed in great depth—in the jargon and manner of any of the many "-isms" of literary theory.

Pike is the focal point around which a very funny, absorbing, and recognizably human cast of personalities revolve, scheme, manuever, and jockey for position. Enormously wealthy, Pike seems to undertake mammoth development projects for no identifiable reason, with no purpose whatsoever. Here, he builds a K-Mart in the boondocks of nowhere, the New Hampshire wilderness. His opportunistic assistant is a novelist named Stuart Breen who has published one novel and is having a hard time getting a second off the ground. Stuart's wife Marlene is an alcoholic exhibitionist whose cravings to be seen naked in public are rapidly becoming less and less controllable.

The other significant moneybags in the state—and, by the way, the local color and flavor of Rhode Island are communicated with great nuance and skill—is Greg Reese, whose old money family (really old...centuries old) is the force behind the charitable Reese Foundation, where all is not quite as smooth as it seems. Reese's daughter, Allison, is sliding between various forms of recreational drugs while her boyfriend, Heath has ambitions toward filmmaking as well as a special affinity for Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys and his unfinished masterpiece, Smile.

Around these six main characters Heppner builds an apologue that's amusing, serious, satirical, and observing. Many intriguing supporting players buzz, like mosquitoes, around the principal six, trying to influence the course of events as much as possible and, fascinating as the main players are, the others often stand out most vividly to the reader. There's Henry Savage, a Washington hack who meditates, in a hilariously self-pitying moment, that men and women of the U.S. Government agencies aren't "evil automatons with computer chips planted in their brains"; Celia Shriver, who, at sixty-seven, still displays ardent enthusiasm for political rallies and who has one planned for Pike, calling him a "canker sore"; an unnamed counter girl in a Dunkin Donuts who gets exasperated about giving a lost traveler some directions; and quite a few others. Very much a colorful human landscape. I was reminded of the analogy of a master drummer playing virtuoso fills between the other instruments in a musical group.

Significant parts of this novel are concerned with the cinema (Heath Baxter is an aspiring auteur, and Pike has film production in his past) and, as he did with Joseph Heller, Heppner demonstrates that he, himself, is as versed in the subject as his characters are. Besides a voluminous knowledge of movies, the author also has a serious ability to do what all screenwriters are supposed to do: show, don't tell. That is, make word pictures that ring true in the reader's mind. I'll cite just one resonant example among many. Stuart and Marlene are having an argument: "Both she and Stuart were standing with their fists balled, their foreheads almost touching." While I read Pike's Folly, I was concurrently reading a novel by Theodore Dreiser amd was amazed at the contrast in styles, how Heppner could say in one sentence what it would take Dreiser perhaps three pages to describe and, not only that—though Heppner's story is greatly concerned with politics in various ways, it's never preachy, never sermonizing. A character began her political career in D.C. but she was "way too raw and unabashedly partisan to make it inside the Beltway, where nothing ever happened without compromise". Again, I smiled at how, in Drieser, this simple truth would never even be acknowledged; politics would be presented as a fight to the death, with definitive winners and losers. What a contrast!

Another major subject the novel examines (as is natural in our times) is the nature of the Internet, and how it's changed and affected all of our lives. It does this in two important scenes, both humorous: first, when Marlene becomes a "celebrity" on a Web site devoted to streakers and nudists, and, second, when Heath does an online, real time interview with fans after he moves to L.A., towards the end of the novel. Anyone can draw his/her own conclusions as to what Heppner means to imply about the nature of the Web and its impact upon the culture, but what I thought of, immediately, is how these ultramodern, up-to-the-minute examinations of life right now contrast with the brief scenes in the novel that describe events of hundreds of years ago, scenes that gradually fill us in on some horrible events of the past, and what is common and similar in the lives of those colonial peoples with our contemporary existence. The DNA, if you like, hasn't changed.

For purposes of easy identification, I'll try to point out some of the themes and issues the novel, as a whole, takes up, and sort out which character or characters are involved in each. This list is not supposed to be exhaustive or final but, rather, a starting point for anyone interested in looking at this most engrossing book in some level of detail. I noticed: the nature of democracy and the political process (Celia Shriver, Cathy Diego, Allison Reese and others want to organize a huge anti-Pike demonstration; numerous members of the Rhode Island lawmaking contingent owe Pike money; Henry Savage is a Washington lifer); the saga of a family's skeletons in the closet, family history (the Reeses); the nature of the contrast of appearances and reality (all is not quite what it seems with Pike, as well as with the Reeses, as well as with a certain house that stands at the apex of the tale; Marlene is, in her core, being not at all what she appears to be); the relationship between a mentor and a mentee (Brian Wilson to Heath; Pike to Heath; and, it could be argued, Heath to Stuart); issues of what does and does not constitute a successful relationship (Heath and Allison; Marlene and Stuart; Carla Marshall and Bill); the usefulness of artists sharing ideas on the artistic process (Heath, Brian Wilson, Stuart, the French chef Lucien; even Heath and Marlene—in a weird kind of director-actor relationship); the tortured genius (Brian Wilson; marginally, Heath). I think these are all worthy angles for the serious student to pursue.

Before concluding, I want to make a quick point for the literary theorists among us who might be hungering for a little indulgence in stucturalism or postmodernism. In the opening scene, Nathaniel Pike observes, "If I were a fruit, I'd be a banana." Interestingly, somewhere within the next fifty pages, another character is also compared to a banana. What's the point? What's the symbolism of the banana? How is it used as a metaphor to tie one character to another? Granted, not everyone cares about this kind of self-indulgent exercise, but for those who do, it may well bear fruit!

Pike's Folly is quite impressive. Sharply observant, daring, not afraid to tackle large and relevant questions, it manages to be all that and extremely entertaining at the same time. Mike Heppner was kind enough to answer some questions about his novel for us, and we present them here and now: