Books

Jim Lehrer is apparently able to write as many novels as he has time to type.

This one, No. 17, seems to have sprung effortlessly from a brain teeming with Big Band tunes and toys from childhood, midlife career angst and satirical barbs aimed at the obligatory status badges and appliances of conspicuous consumption.

It's effortless to read as well, pleasurable even. Because Mr. Lehrer is an experienced news reporter, he's good at telling a story.

It begins with an epiphany, a "eureka" moment, at an antiques sale, and drives forward six weeks to the end with no creative-writing-school literary techniques to impress professors and flummox readers.

What the characters say is expressed in language readily familiar to literate book-buyers and set off by quotation marks to distinguish it from exposition.

Absent are converging counterplots, ostentatious similes to denote that a thing is like some other thing, and symbolism (except maybe for the title).

Again, these are the methods of good reporting.

The author is the PBS news anchor for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. He was a Dallas Morning News writer in the 1960s. In the 1970s he went to the Dallas Times Herald and also moderated KERA's evening news show.

He was born in Kansas, however, where this story takes place.

It is the story of Otis Halstead, CEO of a large insurance company with headquarters in Eureka.

He is rich, proper and so regular that when he goes out of town for a day to buy himself a present for his 60th birthday, everybody panics.

But inside Otis there is a happy man, "Buck," a wanderer, righter of wrongs, crooner of 650 Johnny Mercer songs, trying to get out. His wife sets him up with the local psychiatrist, a man himself teetering on the tightrope of his own eureka moment.

What Otis buys for himself is a restored 1952 Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter. It is his Rocinante, astride which he sets out with his Daisy Red Ryder air rifle, his $12,350 toy firetruck, $5,000 cash, and wearing, instead of a quixotic pasteboard visor, his Kansas City Chiefs football helmet.

There is another world out there in the little villages along blue highway 56.

There are robbers to combat, overzealous cops and damsels who are distressed and in need of Otis' (Buck's) assistance.

There is even a lovely Dulcinea, Sharon, who appears beside Farnsworth Creek and rides behind him briefly, her young body pressing against his quickening spine.

Like the errant knight of old, Otis tumbles from his Rocinante and is returned with a concussion to his proper family.

When he sings the answers to their questions in Johnny Mercer lyrics, they are confused but hopeful that he will return to pre-scooter-riding, Daisy-air-rifle-wielding, running-away-from-home Otis.

They should have known that a true knight is not to be deterred from his quest.

"Bye-bye, baby,

Time to hit the road to dreamland.

Don't cry, baby ...

Time to hit the road."

NPR commentator Tom Dodge, www.tom dodgebooks.com, lives in Midlothian.

Jim Lehrer

(Random House, $24.95)

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