Current Novel: Wiley at the Gates of Paradise

Edgar Wiley’s life is running down, and so one May in the early decades of the 21st century elvish old Wiley decides it’s  time—now or never!—to make a boyhood dream come true. He’ll spend six months—“ice-out to ice-in”—on the lake he loves in the Adirondacks, a place alive for him with friendly ghosts and generations of family stories. He arrives elated, with his wife of 30 years by his side for a few days to help him settle in; but not two months go by before his past and present are crumbling beneath him, and he discovers the land of his dreams is under attack by a pharmaceutical ogre with grand visions for his earthly paradise.

Can this shrunken septuagenarian and his mismatched band of flawed allies—his wife Gwen, a driven New York agent for the dead; the all-knowing, lordly, African-American giant Roosevelt Joplin McWashington; Nehemiah Stern, an irascible Nobel Prize winner and Wiley’s lifelong friend; Wiley’s boyhood sweetheart, the brave, lost Lucille Bulger; the knockout serial bride Elizabeth Ross (“Madame America”) and her moody boyfriend, Lou Patou, marina man; the hypnotic Mohawk seeress Sun Feather and her caustic poet-husband; Wiley’s Uncle Punch, who has always found his nephew lacking, and Punch’s wife Isabella, who ardently believes Wiley’s problem is being married to the wrong woman; a taciturn team of brothers plying the antiquated trade of bush piloting—can such a cast of oddities (and a few more like them) find the will and a way to thwart the assault on Wiley’s “forever wild” eden, even as our hero’s physical and mental resources slip, and his deepest assumptions and cherished myths disintegrate to dust?  Yes, they can—if only for now, against forces that will not relent for long.