It dawned on me rather late in the book – around page 140 or so, as the crazy train narrative was just about to leap its last rails – that there was a shaggy-dog retelling of a well-known tragedy at the heart of this book, full of groan-inducing puns. I think I was blinded to it by the word play and madcap picaresque; or maybe I was supposed to miss it, just as the eponymous narrator misses it right to the end, and all the pieces start to fall into place, and then fall out of place again, because it was all a three-card monte misdirection after all.
Set in a near-future hellscape version of Boston (“The Beast”) of hyperinflation, packs of street urchins, underground squatter cities, and gated New Jersey suburbs, “Fast Eddie” is a playful, crazy, inventive story in the tradition of “Huck Finn,” “Tom Jones,” and “The Good Soldier Svjek.” The hero-narrator gets into scrape after crazy scrape, each one more inescapable than the last, and somehow climbs this ladder of chaos to the top of the underground Dig City. It’s best read the way you watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon, with critical faculties turned off and disbelief fully suspended. Energetic and frenetic to the very end, and a tour-de-force of alliteration and silly puns, this is an entertaining and engaging ride of a book.