What the Deaf-Mute Heard
A confusion of tone muddles Gearino's debut novel, an otherwise engaging yarn about an abandoned boy who feigns a handicap to expose religious and moral corruption in a small Southern town in the 1960s. Sammy Ayers, the 62-year-old first-person narrator looking back on his life, seems to aspire to a form of Gumpdom (the idiot who's really not an idiot makes idiots of everyone else)-but he's just a bit too literate and a bit too savvy. Abandoned at 10 by his mother at the bus station in Barrington, Ga., Sammy conceals his ability to speak. He works out an arrangement with the station manager to clean the facility in exchange for room and board; and after a brief but unsuccessful try at school, he begins to perform odd jobs around town where he grows into adulthood. Thinking he's deaf and dumb, people speak freely around Sammy, and in this manner he learns most of the town's secrets, chief of which is the fact that Tolliver Tynan, the local minister, is involved in an illegal land deal. Various forces of corruption and duplicity come together during a tragedy at an anti-Beatles bonfire organized by Tynan, who becomes incensed by John Lennon's famous crack about being "bigger than Jesus." Unfortunately, as North Carolina journalist Gearino moves back and forth between the various subplots, the implications of the tragic rally and Sammy's occasional efforts to track down his lost father, he never settles into a comfortable storytelling stride. This scattershot approach dulls his characters and cuts a ragged, not very dramatic path to the novel's final revelations about Sammy's parentage.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.