(5 of 5)
Few college-inspired novels this side of Fitzgerald's Paradise have been even B-plus efforts. Wild Oats is a refreshing exception. Recent Yale Graduate Jacob Epstein set his low-key whimsy at fictitious Beacham University, a liberal arts college with a hundred-year tradition of the second-rate. Its off-centerpiece, Billy Williams, literally starts off on the wrong foot by stepping on the college master's dachshund at a cocktail party. He writes a term paper on the Iliad titled "The Shoes of the Greeks," falls for a coed named Zizi Zanzibar and takes Chinese so he can know "something hardly anyone else knew, except for several hundred million Chinese people." Woody Allen would recognize the type.
If only he could go home again. But back in Manhattan lurk Billy's sister Abby, who clomps "the treacherous hike from the bathroom to the kitchen linoleum" in hiking boots; his twice-divorced mother; and her balding lover Henry, whom Billy catches poring over nymphet glossies in a porn shop. Epstein is at his best with fresh comic perceptions of growing up absurd in a multiparent home. He is at his weakest in describing Billy's moony infatuation with Zizi, which leads to the novel's adolescent denouement.
Still, this is promising reading from a young author (son of Jason Epstein, editorial director of Random House) who is just funny enough to be taken seriously.