The devil in the dooryard - Hardcover

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What do you do if you espouse the Puritan ethic of John Winthrop but live in contemporary Boston. John Jenney Wheelwright, descendant of antinomian preachers and Indian fighters, flees to one of the harbor islands, where he meticulously re-creates the house of an early settler and goes forth to woo and wed his promiscuous cousin Mehitible. In a comic parallel to his ancestor, an Indian captive during King Philip's War, Wheelwright and his wife are captured by a modern King Philip, a Harvard-educated lawyer whose band has occupied the island as a protest in favor of Indian land claims. Smith has written an updated version of Santayana's The Last Puritan , a 1980s sardonic black comedy that shows we are still as haunted by the specters of savages and witches as were our ancestors; and that the pursuit of moral purity can produce evil results. An auspicious debut.Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Smith's ambitious, experimental first novel takes its title from the writings of the preacher and moralist Cotton Mather. Using several other 17th century American narrativesi.e., a "Description of New England" and an Indian captivityas models and subtexts, protagonist John Wheelwright, who calls himself "Wright," inveighs in the spirit of a Puritan divine against today's evils of abortion, infidelity, shoddy architecture, game shows and female vanity, to name a few. Wright, assuming the identity of a young cabinetmaker and historian of colonial Massachusetts, does not always succeed in interesting his wife, Hetty, in his archeological digs or his communications with long-dead ancestors and the Wampanoag sachem King Philip. Hetty's main concern is her professional guardianship of a pair of autistic twins, whose plight reflects the fallen world. As it shuttles between the past and present, tracing current American woes to the prophecies of our Anglican and Puritan forefathers, the novel is too didactic, too stuffed with lengthily quoted literary passages and moral outrage to seize the reader's sympathetic attention. Smith is capable of writing very well, but this novel misfires.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.