Christopher Fahy

Fever 42

by Christopher Fahy

Overlook Connection Press, 332 pages, hardback, 2002



Every once in a while a novel comes along which jolts the
senses so radically that it can be difficult for the reader to
withdraw from the logic of the tale and return to the logic of
the real world. Classic examples are Joseph Heller's Catch-
22 and, perhaps paramount, Luke Rinehart's The Dice
Man. And now there is Christopher Fahy's Fever 42.



Comparisons with The Dice Man are not out of order.
Although there are extravagant differences between the two books,
the feel of their narratives has some similarity and, more
particularly, there is the same sense that the protagonist has a
self-destructive bent the reader is only too willing to share.
The Dice Man is the more mind-twisting of the two;
Fever 42 gains its strength from being the more plausible
and the more human. Where The Dice Man focused on the
lunacy of permitting one's life to be governed entirely by
chance, Fever 42 focuses on the lunacy born of
understandable human failings.



42-year-old teacher Ted Wharton is stuck in a so-so job and
marriage. He loves his wife, of course he does, even if she's
exasperating and their sex life tedious. He loves his kids, of
course he does, even if they're high-octane brats. And so on.



He's wrenched out of this by one of his students, class sex
bomb Joy Dollinger; she aggressively seduces him, initiating a
reckless affair. Though little more than a third of his age, she
is far more sexually experienced than he is, and delights in
educating him in the wilder and more inventive practices she
knows — delights he's never even dreamed existed. They
couple in seedy motels but more often in places where their
exhilaration is intensified by the possibility of discovery,
notably on school premises. His life becomes a maelstrom of porn
videos and magazines, bizarre gadgetry . . . and
excitement, the excitement that's been missing from his
life for too long. Wharton's is a midlife crisis par
excellence.



Obviously, it's also a recipe for disaster. The liaison
cannot forever go undiscovered; neither can the graphic polaroids
and videos they've made of each other in flagrante delicto
more flagrant than the most flagrant delictos many of us have
attempted in the privacy of our own homes. Worse: Joy declares
she loves Ted forever and persuades herself he's going to ditch
his family and marry her, and when he declines to do so starts
manipulating him by threatening to reveal the truth to all —
particularly, of course, that she was legally underage when the
boffing began. Before that, at least a hundred pages before Ted does,
we know his life is going to be destroyed; we want him to stop
his frantic career toward catastrophe, and yet at the same time
we know even more so that stop is the last thing we want him to
do.



Sure enough, the inevitable calamity comes to pass. But Fahy
manages very beautifully — without the slightest trace of
cloy — to give Ted a redemption of sorts.



Ribald, erotic, hilarious, deeply serious and tragic, often
all at the same time, Fever 42 is one of those rare books
that restores our faith in the mainstream novel — and,
strangely, in humanity.





This review, first published by Crscent Blues, is
excerpted from my ebook Warm Words and Otherwise: A Blizzard
of Book Reviews, to be published on September 19 by Infinity
Plus Ebooks.


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