EUREKA
Jim Lehrer
Random House
Fiction
ISBN: 9781400064878

Otis Halstead, a quiet, competent, civic-minded CEO of a Kansas casualty and life insurance company in Eureka, Kansas, is a contentedly married father of a college-age daughter. Just three weeks short of his 60th birthday, he is visiting an antiques toy show when he is suddenly seized by a desire to pay $12,500 for a mint condition toy fire engine exactly like the one he didn’t get for his fifth Christmas.
 
Then, in a catalog on memorabilia, he spots a Red Ryder BB rifle complete with official BBs in its original carton. As soon as it arrives via FedEx Express, he hastily erects a target in the backyard and starts spending his free time pinging away at paper targets until he becomes a crack shot.
 
Next is an authentic Kansas City Chiefs football helmet that he begins to wear in public because it covers his bald head, making him look younger. By now his wife and friends are becoming concerned about his behavior, and when he disappears one Saturday and returns late that night towing a 1952 Cushman motor scooter on a trailer, that is when they insist he seek professional help. Otis reluctantly agrees to confer with Bob Gilroy, his best friend and a psychologist at a famed Eureka mental health clinic. Bob suggests that he talk to a specialist in “aging male syndrome,” but Otis observes that Dr. Tonganoxie is even stranger than he is and decides that the only way to cure his hunger for change is to run away from home. 
 
And so it is that we accompany Otis aboard his red 1952 Cushman motor scooter on his own, within-the-speed-limit version of Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD. Jack Kerouac he is not --- there are no pot parties or peeing off the back of freight cars in Otis’s journey to adventure. He does not awake after any orgies or with strange women in his bed. No doubt the wildest night is spent in a garage in Church Key Charlie Blue’s chocolate fudge factory along Kansas Highway 56, where Otis arrives, bruised and soaked to the skin after an accident in a rainstorm. There begins his odyssey to self-awareness, fraught with danger and pitfalls never encountered on the golf course or at his business man’s club.
 
Jim Lehrer, author of 16 prior novels, has constructed a warm, humorous and poignant story of a nice man who thinks he has everything and discovers that there is more to life than success.

   --- Reviewed by Roz Shea

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