For the Love of Mirth

"Call me asshole." So begins the coming to grips novel of Protagoras Mirth, (The Measure of Things, or, Do we Ever Know?) channeling his own White Whale: the love of Nicole, a French exchange student he fell in love with in HS. That story follows the typical pattern of first love: exalted passion, missteps, abortion, dissembling, coming out as the proclaimed God, making millions and then losing it all in a lawsuit to an old schoolmate, finally going to France after reaching rock-bottom to reclaim her, "having learned something about loose ends and laggard love that the Mills Brothers in their mellifluous harmonies had hedged," only to discover the bottom is farther down. The usual sort of things.But there is another story going on. His life having collapsed into an irremediable state of mess, Protagoras has retreated from France to a cabin in Vermont, to evade his comeuppance: namely, Smitty: "Inscrutable face. Lower lip sucking on his mustache... who walks tipping forward like Bullwinkle the Moose at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade." As Mirth writes: 'The world imagined by Smitty was so perfectly dull and improbable that I did not imagine that it could ever intersect with my own: botched, discursive, amatory, desultory, sentimental, serene.' Smitty has read Mirth's novel, and has no sense of humor about it; he is the man who stole his fortune, who apparently has also been in love with Nicole all along, and may or may not be leaving a trail of murders in his single-minded pursuit of Protagoras