A mysteriously absent wife, a buxom Realtor, an unexpected benefactor and a deserted tropical island - these are the main ingredients for Bruce Ducker's new novel, Mooney in Flight.

It's a good set-up for a story about a man in a mid-life crisis. And Ducker follows through, developing his character, Leonard Mooney, in first-class midlife crisis form. Mooney's mantra is "Don't get mad, don't get even, just get out."

The novel begins with Mooney arriving at his remote tropical inheritance. It is an isolated affair - he flies from middle America to the Bahamas, takes a launch to the last inhabited key and finally boards a leaky rowboat to his remote island.

It is from this island that he narrates his story. And the story is a compelling, sometimes dark read.

Ducker's writing style effectively evokes the desperation of Mooney's situation. The physical landscape reflects Mooney's emotional one. It is the rainy season; the skies are mostly gray and the sand fleas are inescapable.

Sometimes, though, Ducker's descriptions are over the top. When Mooney first arrives on the island, for example, he contemplates the reality of his decision. "What in hell had I done? The stupidity of the island, the loneliness and stupidity of it all shuddered through me, a small delight like the passing of gas."

And in describing Mooney's second wife (the buxom Realtor), Mooney compares her white thighs to Gorgonzola cheese. Not flattering - though I gather that he means to be.

The descriptions set the tone, though, as Ducker slips between Mooney's rum-dazed, self-destructive existence on the island and the past that haunts him. He describes the painful loss of Mooney's son and then his first wife. He documents his dismal job at the Office of the Clerk of the Municipal Court, his petty feud with a co-worker, the inevitable divorce of his second wife.

Even Mooney's benefactor, Hofstadter, the man who leaves him the remote island, is described as a miserable character. Hofstadter has lost his larynx to throat cancer. "Every so often," Ducker writes, "he removed the apparatus that hooked his mechanical box to the muscles in his throat, exposing the dressed O in his neck, and plugged in a cigarette."

Just when it seems that Mooney's life is too depressing to bear, a young woman enters the picture. It is a midlife crisis, after all. And Mooney admits that she's probably younger than his own daughter.

I won't give away too much, but the young woman, Arden, is a breath of fresh air in the story. A slightly flaky Bohemian adventurer, she becomes the catalyst Mooney needs to change. And man, do things begin to change.

This is the hard part of any review: assessing a book without giving away the ending. I'll just say that Ducker builds the story to a fantastic crisis that forces Mooney to question his mantra, "Don't get mad, don't get even, just get out."

A standard Hollywood plot requires a character to transform in some inspirational way. Although the novel would make a great screenplay (a cross between Cast Away and Barfly), Ducker verges on changing Mooney too much, too fast at the very end.

Mooney is a powerful character in that his passivity and his depression are real. His faults are revealed not only in his own estimation, but also in the way the other characters (especially his wives and children) relate to him.

Overall, the story is a gripping, imaginative read. The key players - Mooney's missing family, his strange benefactor and the tropical island - come together in intriguing ways. I found myself, at the end of the book, rooting for Mooney to get on out there and face his life fully, possibly for the first time.



Ashley Simpson Shires is a freelance writer living in Boulder. Her work has been published in literary journals including the "American Literary Review" and the "Brooklyn Review."