The Free Fall of Webster Cummings (Signed)

Losing his arm in an Alaskan machinery accident, Ed Flannigan moves to Oregon, where he confronts New Age colonists, organic farmers, and a cranky guardian angel who resides in a peach tree. Tour.

Bodett makes like Garrison Keillor here, writing a novel that reflects the homespun values of a popular NPR series (in Bodett's case, The End of the Road) and several collections spun off from it (The Big Garage on Clear Shot, 1992, etc.). In the New Age mecca of Quartz Creek, Ore., old traditions find new appreciation as Bodett mixes homage and parody, celebrating all the colorfully absurd permutations of the American family. When Ed Flannigan, having lost his arm and his employability, reluctantly moves his family down from Alaska, he has no idea he will soon join a 12-step program for substance abusers, become a peach farmer and open his new home to some improbable family reunions. In Seattle, meanwhile, homeless amnesiac Oliver searches for his past?and perhaps his future?in his avid nightly dreams. From Avalon, Ohio, retirees Lloyd and Evelyn Decker head west in a flashy new RV to visit their inhospitable children and see some of the world. And Bostonian Webster Cummings, after surviving a freak accident that sucks him out of an airliner in mid-flight, sets out to find his biological parents. Bodett develops these stories as separate puzzle pieces to be assembled only at the end of the novel. His narration can be sketchy and superficial, with some characters never rising above type, and ambivalent in its stance toward central issues of family dysfunction, pop psychology and mysticism. He knows how to spin a yarn, however, and raise a chuckle, and will leave readers in good humor, with some insights gained.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bodett, of Motel 6 commercial and NPR fame, author of collections of homespun vignettes such as The End of the Road (1989), offers a flawed but often moving first novel. Webster Cummings, a Boston statistician, falls from an airplane over New Hampshire but happens to land in perfect tandem with the angle of a ski slope. He slides into the valley below and uphill again, then is catapulted to his feet like some sort of superhero. This near-death experience causes Webster to reassess his thus far inconsequential life: An adoptee, he becomes obsessed with finding his real mother and father. From this grand and amusing, if unlikely, premise, Bodett begins peeling away layers of mystery, beginning in Alaska with a teenaged couple banned by a cruel old patriarch for sleeping together out of wedlock, then to Ohio, Indiana, Seattle, and the fruit country of north-central Oregon--where most of the story is set. No doubt about it, Bodett loves his small-town folk and does them beautifully: a fragile, na‹ve Ohio couple who trade in their home for a gas-guzzling RV and go visit the children who don't want to see them; a dreamy, homeless man who wanders the Seattle waterfront, reporting for his various ``jobs''; a heavy equipment operator who loses his arm in an accident, drifts toward alcoholism, and finds redemption in bringing to life a failed peach orchard. Just as often, Bodett is a masterful light satirist: His portrait of a bicoastal yuppie couple having their first baby is a scream. When it comes to plotting, however, Bodett is a third-rate Dickens, relying on contrivance and coincidence to bring his huge cast together. So the only reason to read him is his people, who break your heart. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bodett mixes some of the characters from his broadcast and print stories set in little End of the Road, Alaska, with a bunch of folks from the lower 48 (states, that is) in a mannishly sentimental comic novel that's a wee bit weird and ever so heartwarming. Structurally, it's a quilt of stories about at-first-blush unrelated people who, as the pieces get stitched together, turn out to be family. They include, from the stories of The Big Garage at Clearshot (1990), one-armed Ed Flannigan and teenager Norman Tuttle; a homeless guy in Seattle; a New Age channeler-cum-priestess in Oregon; a senior book editor and an advertising exec who are married but living in New York and Los Angeles, respectively; a retired couple who trade their Ohio home for an RV and the lure of the highway; that couple's son and daughter, who separately headed West before them; and Webster Cummings, statistician extraordinaire, who was sucked, midflight, out an airliner's window yet landed on his feet without a scratch--a providence that makes him, an adoptee, decide to find his birth parents. There's also a guardian angel out in the orchard of the Oregon place Ed moves to when his wife gets a teaching job. This is the kind of old-fashioned popular fiction Frank Capra made into movies. Yep, it's that entertaining. Ray Olson

Webster Cummings, who improbably survives a plunge from an airplane, is one of more than a dozen colorful characters whose endeavors and adventures are charmingly related in this delightful book. We meet them a few at a time in apparently unrelated vignettes, but eventually their paths intersect and they discover relationships that are both comical and touching. Folksy characters are the stock-in-trade of radio personality/author Bodett (The Big Garage on Clear Shot, Morrow, 1990), and he is in good form with a likable cast that also includes the Flannigans, who move to Oregon and encounter many New Age targets for satire; the Bedinger-Hooples, who are having a baby despite living 3000 miles apart; and Oliver the Dreamer, a homeless amnesiac living under a bridge with other kind souls in Seattle. Recommended for most fiction collections.?Will Hepfer, SUNY at Buffalo Libs.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.