Books: Homer in Chicago

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A DREAM OF KINGS by Harry Mark Petrakis. 180 pages. David McKay. $4.50.

John Doe, 47, a tenement-dwelling Midwesterner in hock to the corner delicatessen, pursues solvency at the horse parlor and the poker table. His purpose is exemplary: he wants to move his seven-year-old son, dying of epilepsy, to a desert climate. A soft-hearted stud dealer pledges the necessary pot but dies before delivering. Doe next touches a baker's doughy widow, to whom he has previously applied for favors of another order; she indignantly draws the line at moneylending. Eventually, Doe's own wife stakes him, unsolicited. And off he flies with Junior, into a roseate dawn. This is essentially the story of A Dream of Kings.* By Homerizing it, Harry Petrakis has made it read like a cameo epic—one that has now settled onto the bestseller lists.

Petrakis' John Doe is Leonidas Matsoukas, a beefy and ebullient Hellene who, like the author, is a member of Chicago's Greek-American community, locally known as the Bush. For a fee, Matsoukas counsels mortals on such mundane affairs as impotence, wrestling, enuresis and masturbation. He also speaks exclusively in the heroic style; everyone in the book does. "Some say you are dead, that all this is mask and charade," says Matsoukas, addressing God. "I will tell you what I think has happened. Heaven has become for you a shadowed cavern of emptiness and longing. Your glory has departed. Man have mercy on you."

Some critics have added Petrakis' name to the literary tree that bore Homer and Nikos Kazantzakis. That's going out on a limb, perhaps. It is reasonable enough to say that this third novel has the virtues of forthrightness and utter simplicity and shows, at least, how much a little hubris on the author's part can improve an indifferent story.