The Fingerprints of Armless Mike

A darkly comic novel follows the exploits of a poor Irish-Polish rogue named Mike Standish, who sells his blueblood wife's family heirlooms as revenge for the slights of his snobby mother-in-law. Tour.

A strong narrative voice, a sure sense of storytelling and a bedeviling dash of surprise invigorate Simpson's (Full Moon Over America) tale of a man on the run. Mike Standish, a self-described "dirty old Polack" from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., narrates this novel belly-up to a bar in remote Devil's Cay in the Bahamas. After a few failed romances, we learn, Mike fell in love with and married Sarah Browne, a New Jersey blueblood of the purest stock. The couple's marriage became a sticking point when they were forced to move in with Iron Kate, Sarah's rigid, caste-obsessed mother, who developed an unholy distaste for Mike and what she saw as his gold-digging charm. Goaded by Kate's insinuations, Mike decided to establish his new family in a home of their own. To do so, he secretly hocked Kate's collection of antiques, fleeing the country when his fingerprints on the goods threatened to disclose his involvement. As Mike ruminates on the past, he reveals his yearning for his wife, whom he hopes will come searching for him, and reflects on the role his lust for sex and money played in his turn to crime. Stuck in a hurricane, plagued by loneliness and self-doubt, Mike tells a pungent tale that deftly caricatures how a man can be freewheeling, wily and noble all at the same time. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Much ado about precious little in the old-money suburbs, which Simpson (Full Moon Over America, 1994; The Gypsy Storyteller, 1993) has walked us through before. This time, the geography is extended a bit. Mike Standish is pretty seriously adrift. When we meet him, he is on the lam in the Caribbean, holed up on a little spit of sand called the Devil's Cay after successfully burgling his mother-in- law's house and fleeing the country. Mike's real name is Standowski, not Standish, but he changed that when he left his working-class Poughkeepsie home for Ithaca College. There, his preppie roommate, Graham Cramer, introduced Standish to high society by inviting him for holidays to Treetops, his family's lavish estate in New Jersey horse country, where Standish took to the scenery so well that he ended up marrying Cramer's very rich sister-in-law Sarah Browne. Although he has now started a career of sorts as a photographer, his standing as a social upstart suspected of marrying for money prompts Standish to take a job in the family firm, a real-estate business that turns out to be involved in a variety of unsavory deals--and that becomes his real initiation into the world of money (``If I was a crook, I reminded myself in way of justification, then I was by no means the only one. Oh no, those affluent hills were crawling with crooks of the white-collar variety''). As Standish's resentment of his in-laws begins to force a crisis, he finds himself simultaneously being drawn deeper into a world of genuine criminality. The circumstances leading to his flight are described obsessively, though it must be said that they can hardly account for his path in the end. The climax is a hurricane that comes, suitably enough, out of nowhere. Sound and fury: basically a modest story given the treatment of an epic tragedy. Unlikely to convince. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mike Standish (nee Standowski) is on the lam. He's ripped off about a half-million dollars in antique furniture from his imperious, bigoted mother-in-law, sold it to a fence for a tiny fraction of its value, and then managed to leave his fingerprints all over the stolen goods. Now he's trapped on a remote island in the Bahamas as a killer hurricane approaches. Simpson has done a marvelous job of creating a sympathetic yet thoroughly disreputable protagonist. Standish has spent most of his life sponging off his friends, cheating on and abandoning his girlfriends, and shoplifting the gear he needs to fuel his only real passion, photography. Now, as the law and his family close in on him, all he can do is drink and feel sorry for himself. He fantasizes a harrowing scenario in which his wife forgives him and rescues him from the storm, only to discover that, in reality, she's written him off as a bad investment. The only discordant note here is Standish's unbelievable repentance in the last few pages. Otherwise, this is an extremely entertaining novel. George Needham

Simpson, who is making a name for himself in contemporary fiction (e.g., The Gypsy Storyteller, LJ 2/15/93), takes us inside the head of Michael Standish (born Standowski), and it is not a particularly pleasant place to be. Standish is a man who uses people and discards them, a photographer of some talent who never bothers actually to earn any money, a man who lives off other people. Nonetheless, he sincerely loves his wife, Sarah, and their son, Tim. So why does he steal his despised mother-in-law's valuable antiques? Why is he dumb enough to leave his fingerprints all over the goods? Why can't he stay around to take the consequences like a man? Even Standish can't tell you that, but he is trying to figure it out. The characters are strongly drawn, and the narrative is oddly compelling in spite of the narrator's loutishness. Recommended for fiction collections.?Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.