Horace Afoot

In this brilliantly comic first novel, a solitary and articulate outsider walks the quiet streets of a small midwestern town, making himself up from fragments of Latin poems, shards of ancient thought, and a few scattered appearances before the county clerk. And the townsfolk are understandably suspiciousespecially when this man who calls himself Horace starts making random Socratic phone calls at all hours and turning up half-dressed every time there's trouble. Following in the literary footsteps of Walker Percy, Frederick Reuss charms us with the musings, vices, and brief encounters of a reluctant humanist who ingeniously challenges a broad American complacency with a charmingly specific search for meaning: What do you think of St. Bernards?