When Wallace Webster is eased out of his partnership at a Houston design firm, he's at an awkward age--too young to pack it in, too old to start over. His response is to retreat to his condominium in a "spectacularly kitschy" Gulf Coast town. The nearly constant presence of attractive women in his life--from his platonic relationship with Jilly, a coworker only slightly older than his daughter, to his fitful affair with Chantal White, a sexy restaurant owner with a dark past--somehow fails to brighten his mood.
Life at Forgetful Bay Condominiums is anything but placid. One resident dies in a car crash, and Chantal is tied up by an intruder who covers her with blue paint. That's only in the novel's first 15 pages, before the mass mailbox thefts, the nude dancer in the driveway of the homeowners' association president and a suicide. One can only imagine the residents' dismay at what a character calls an "appalling parade of unlikely events." The bizarre happenings at the sleepy condos highlight the disconnection from neighbors that's become one of the defining characteristics of modern life. More than that, Frederick Barthelme (Waveland) suggests, is how unknowable, and truly strange, the lives of others often are.
Even as Wallace leads a life that can be described only as adrift, he never wanders off onto irony's seductive path. There Must Be Some Mistake might have foundered in a sea of cynicism, but in the end Barthelme manages to salvage something that looks suspiciously like a glimmer of hope. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer