From Library Journal
The narrator of this skillfully crafted first novel is an eccentric, introspective loner named Horace, who moves into a rickety house on a dead-end street in a Midwestern town named Oblivion. Although Horace's past and the motivation for his move to Oblivion remain ambiguous, he clearly hopes to find refuge and comfort in this small town. Intelligent and literary, he is also existentially troubled, and the peace he hopes to find proves to be elusive. Horace is philosophical by nature, but this impulse more often than not serves to confound and confuse him. His interactions with the townspeople of Oblivion also prove to be problematic, and although he becomes involved in small ways with a few people there, he sadly remains essentially alone throughout this interesting and thoughtful novel. Recommended for libraries with large modern fiction collections.?Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community-Technical Coll., Ct.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, David Sacks
Meet Horace, a mighty odd fellow, the narrator of this charming, unexpectedly poignant first novel.... The novel has its wrinkles.... Yet the reader can overlook such flaws, thanks to the book's confident portrait of the town and its observations on struggling humanity. The simple ending, oddly moving, hits a note of loss and acceptance that could have been written by the original Horace.


Library Journal, October 1, 1997
[a] skillfully crafted first novel


Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1997
[an] idiosyncratic, rather beguiling debut novel


From Kirkus Reviews
A wealthy, erudite, middle-aged loner in search of anonymity settles in the aptly named midwestern town of Oblivion and is swiftly drawn into the town's persistent local mysteries in this idiosyncratic, rather beguiling debut novel. The newcomer is, by any standards, peculiar: He repeatedly changes his name, adopting names of writers he particularly admires, among them William Blake and, most memorably, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (the Roman poet Horace). And in a place where everyone drives, he walks. It's while he's doing so, hiking into the country to visit an old Indian mound, that he becomes inextricably tangled in the town's affairs. A young woman, naked and bleeding, stumbles out of a cornfield and collapses. Horace becomes a prime suspect in her assault, until Sylvia, the young woman, regains consciousness and clears him. She refuses to name her attacker, though, and the police (who harbor some nasty secrets of their own) keep a wary eye on Horace. They become even more suspicious when he's drawn into the violent, messy world Sylvia (a self-destructive, small-time drug dealer) inhabits. And then her callow boyfriend, infuriated by her affection for Horace, begins to follow and harass the newcomer. Horace, against his better judgment, finds himself promising to help Sylvia escape from Oblivion. In doing so, he stumbles across some of the town's unpalatable secrets, putting his life itself at risk. Reuss, in a spare, precise prose, does a deft job of catching, without overdoing, the quirks, obsessions, and longings of his characters. And he effectively renders the unsettling (and misleading) calm of Oblivion, a town frantic to deny or suppress life's unpredictability. Horace, however, is a bit wearing--too skittish, too stubbornly incapable of change--to be very appealing. Still, his voice lingers, as do many of the scenes in this terse, moving exploration of modern anomie and the longing for--and fear of- -intimacy. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Washington Post Book World, October 12, 1997
[a] quietly entertaining, thought-filled novel . . . [a] revealing look into a man's soul


Book Description
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?


From the Publisher
Excerpted from Horace Afoot: Discounting self-interest and sociobiology, instances of real Samaritanism are rare. I sit and rock on my front porch thinking of the one or two, my own one or two. I am showered. Fresh. Fresh shirt, fresh pants. No shoes. The kid next door has resumed watering the driveway and is studiously ignoring me. His mother pokes her head out the side door to shout an order or two and glances over. My porch is about even with their kitchen door and when dad's pickup isn't pulled all the way up the driveway, they have a clear view across the low chain link fence. I ignore them as generously as I can. But I can sense that the Sheriff's escort and the hospital gown I was wearing when I arrived back home has made an impression and renewed their interest in me. Wacko. I can hear the dinner table talk. Now you stay clear, boy. Hear me? Forks wave. He's wacko.

I lift a leg into the chair, rock with purpose. Into mind pops a line from a poem. If you never do anything for anyone else, you are spared the tragedy of human relationships. I like to think the poet meant it. Unfortunately, I think he was just being ironic. I don't at all agree with the idea that a beneficent and thorough-going altruism can negate the tragedy of human relationships, can somehow reverse and obliterate it. Human relationships are tragic a priori, and the true Samaritan acts, not to change this conditionbut in spite of it. The idea, implanted over the centuries by sentimental Christianity and taken over in our time by political propaganda, advertising and the movies, is that by good deeds we negate this tragic condition and transform it into something better. But there is nothing better. The world is not so neatly divided. Good is not accomplished merely by negation of the bad.

I get up and go inside. The thought merits a phone call.

Horace here.

May I help you?

I'm glad you put it that way.

Excuse me?

Do you like Saint Bernards?

Saint Bernard? I don't know who you're talking about.

Not the saint. The dog. You know, the big shaggy things they use in the Alps to rescue people lost in the snow?

Yes, I know. Those huge slobbery animals, the ones with the little wooden barrels around the neck. What about them?

What do you think about them?

What I think?

Yes.

Not a whole lot. Frankly, I hate dogs. They scare me.

I see. But what about in principle?

Are you calling from the Humane Society?

No.

Because if you are, I'm not interested. I have a cat I took in as a stray and as far as I'm concerned I've done my duty by little furry mammals.

I see.

A dog is out of the question. And a big dog? If you ask me I think keeping gigantic pets is cruel. They need the outdoors. They need open spaces to run in. I don't know whose idea it was to make pets out of them, but in my opinion they have perpetrated a giant cruelty. Your organization should speak out against it.

Against pets?

Against big pets. Yes. I've seen some of the literature you put out. About neutering and overpopulation and such things. But I've never seen anything about pet size. I mean, how big is big enough and how big is too big already? That's what you people should be concerned with. My neighbor down the street keeps a pig! Can you imagine? A pig. He says it's from Vietnam but I don't care where he got it. Keep a pig as a pet? In the house? It's disgusting. You people should do something about it.

I hear pigs are smart.

Smart has nothing to do with it. My grandson is smartbut do I let him climb all over the furniture? To let a pig into the houseI'm sorry. It's disgusting. Now if you don't mind I have to go. Sorry about the dog. I hope you find a nice home for it in Switzerland or someplace.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Ordinarily, the mere mention of philosophy -- Jostein Gaarder's SOPHIE'S WORLD is a notable exception -- is enough to intimidate even the most adventurous reader of fiction. But, though Reuss posits serious questions (What is the nature of identity? What defines who we are, what we think, how we act? Is the self merely a set of precepts and conclusions to be put on or taken off like clothing, or is it established at a deeper, immutable level of consciousness?), he succeeds because he asks them in the guise of one of the more oddly compelling, unrepentantly prickly protagonists in recent fiction.

Reuss's hero is a solitary philosophy junkie who calls himself Quintus Horatius Flaccus (after the Augustan poet) -- Horace, for short. Horace, like John Kennedy Toole's memorable misanthrope, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a man at odds with his time, a man who longs for total detachment but finds himself tugged again and again into worldly affairs by "circumstances, conventions, and a weakness for wanting to be good...."

While fleeing the human entanglements of his mysterious past, Horace glimpses an exit for the small midwestern town of Oblivion and is intrigued by the possibilities implicit in such a name. He soon installs himself in a ramshackle house on a dead-end street whose only concession to the modern age is a telephone. There, through impromptu sessions of randomly reaching out and touching someone, Horace is able to pursue his philosophical ideal of autarkeia -- the serenity of not caring -- while keeping human interaction at a cool remove. "Horace here. I'm calling to ask you what you think love is." For Horace, the bemused responses are no less profound than the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle, and far easier to interpret.

A sworn enemy of the internal combustion engine and the society it has engendered, Horace daily ranges on foot throughout the town and its surrounding woodlands. One such foray takes him past an ancient Indian burial mound, where he hears a quick succession of gunshots, then witnesses a naked woman stumbling out of the cornfield, bound, gagged, and bleeding. In a moment of doctrinal weakness, Horace comes to her rescue, flagging down a passing car and taking his Jane Doe to the hospital. But he pays a heavy price for abandoning his prime directive: The traumatized woman claims to suffer from total amnesia, and the local police suspect Horace of raping and beating her.

The police investigation turns up little more than the obvious. Horace is an eccentric, a "rich, educated, middle-aged dude" who has only recently changed his name from William Blake. (Before that, he had impersonated yet another English mystic, Chidiock Tichborne.) But without understanding the full import of their discovery, the police have unearthed Horace's greatest secret.

[My] identity is bound to the name I have taken. Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Call it an act of forced continuity that has bound me to the name while leaving the poet to roam freely in the surviving body of his work. I have found justification for my wanton act in countless passages from SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS. It doesn't matter to me which views are current and which outmoded. The thought is the significant proposition, right? So I'll take whatever I can get from philosophers and from poets alike. I am QHF for the present. I might just as well be Diogenes, Marcus Aurelius or Jesus Christ. But, thankfully, I lack most of the discipline and all of the ambition.

Increasingly obsessed with the identity of his Jane Doe and the history of the Indian mound, Horace is granted access to the local library's private archives by the head librarian, Mr. Mohr. Terminally ill with cancer, Mohr finds Horace's cool, almost brutal detachment a welcome change from the unctuous concern and outright avoidance he has come to expect from the library regulars. But Horace's compromised philosophical discipline is further weakened by his growing friendship with Mohr, and gradually he awakens to the necessity of changing his name once again. At Mohr's suggestion, he chooses Lucian of Samosata -- "a satirist -- with a Cynic bent -- who lived to expose shams and phonies" and who, like Horace, "thoroughly despised his own epoch." But though Horace/Lucian makes a valiant effort to fix his new identity, it comes too late: Someone, perhaps the real rapist, is shadowing Horace, vandalizing his house and chipping away at the last of his hard-won autarkeia. To complicate matters, when Horace does eventually meet his Jane Doe, she is hardly the victim he had imagined. Instead she turns out to be a small-time drug dealer whose violently unpredictable boyfriend is only too willing to indulge her appetite for self-destruction.

Early in the novel Horace laments the "cheerful optimism" of those who believe there is help for every human predicament, saying, "There is no arithmetic of human emotions -- problem + help = solution." But through the authorial application of a unique emotional calculus, Reuss is able to factor the disparate elements of Mohr's impending death, revelations concerning events at the Indian burial mound, and the drama of Horace's ongoing identity crisis to arrive at a wholly satisfying resolution. To Reuss's credit, Horace Afoot does leave some questions unanswered, perhaps in acknowledgment of the quintessentially unknowable. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate consolation of philosophy.

--Greg Marrs

ANNOTATION

A 1999 New York Times Book Review Notable Book , Finalist, SEBA Book Award in Fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"A premier storyteller working in the rich, family-focused, secret-filled tradition of southern literature..." --Booklist

"Skillfully crafted...an interesting and thoughtful novel." --The Washington Post

"An interesting, rather beguiling debut novel." --Kirkus Reviews

Quintis Horatius Flaccus, a.k.a. Horace, the narrator of Frederick Reuss's brilliant first novel, is an eccentric loner -- a well-educated, brooding man whose attempts to adapt his lifestyle to ancient philosophical beliefs are as touching as they are comic. Set in a midwestern town called Oblivion, Horace Afoot is a charming meditation on identity and struggling humanity in the fields of the American heartland.

A solitary and mysterious outsider, Horace arrives in Oblivion, rents a house on a whim, and proceeds to unsettle most of the quiet town's citizenry. Despite his best attempts to isolate himself (he "aspires to a state of complete detachment"), remain self-sufficient, and spurn urbanization and modernity (he refuses to own a car -- "I hate internal combustion engines and the civilization that has built them"), Horace soon crawls from his cocoon. Reaching out to others by making random Socratic phone calls at all hours and befriending two of the town's oddities, Horace finally accepts connection, sacrifice, and risk. In doing so, he also finds completeness.

Following in the literary footsteps of Walker Percy, Frederick Reuss charms us with the musings, vices, and brief encounters of a reluctant humanist who challenges a broad American complacency.

Horace Afoot was chosen to be part of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program.

SYNOPSIS

Horace Afoot, Frederick Reuss's genre-defying debut novel, is at once a compelling philosophical investigation into the nature of identity, a clever murder mystery, and a complex character study of one of the more prickly protagonists in recent fiction. Reuss's reluctant hero is a solitary philosophy junkie who calls himself Quintus Horatius Flaccus (after the Augustan poet) -- Horace, for short. Horace, like John Kennedy Toole's memorable misanthrope, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a man at odds with his time, a man who longs for total detachment but finds himself tugged again and again into worldly affairs by "circumstances, conventions, and a weakness for wanting to be good...." But when this eccentric, middle-aged loner settles in a small midwestern town seeking only the serenity of oblivion, he finds instead the adventure of his life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Classical allusions leap garishly out of a drab minimalist landscape in this incongruous debut. Morbidly self-centered protagonist Horace (self-named after the Latin poet) has come to an anonymous town (self-named, no less pretentiously, Oblivion) in search of autarkeia, "the serenity of not caring." His main occupations are telephoning strangers, reading philosophy, drinking above-average wine, walking aimlessly to the regional airport, the factory of defense contractor Semantech and an Indian mount of indeterminate archeological significance. Horace (full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus) quickly achieves the reputation of an eccentric-about-town and unwillingly clashes with Oblivion's truculent sheriff and the neighborhood juvenile delinquent. Only slightly less reluctantly, he strikes up a reserved friendship with the terminally ill town librarian. Horace's withdrawn existence is ultimately compromised by Sylvia, Reuss's most attractive character. Sylvia is a blue-collar exemplar of unbuttoned emotions and casual sex, but even she can't save the novel as it meanders to an indifferent resolution of its protagonist's bios theoretikos.

Publishers Weekly

Gay's debut, an ambitious saga of love and retribution set in backwoods Georgia in the 1950s, is by turns quaint and charged -- and sometimes both. The novel begins with the 1932 murder of Nathan Winer, an honest and virtuous laborer, by Dallas Hardin, a corrupt small-town tycoon, after Winer demands that Hardin move his illegal whiskey still off Winer's land. Hardin gradually gains control of his community through extortion, bribery and psychological manipulation. When the dead man's son, also Nathan, unwittingly becomes a carpenter for his father's murderer many years afterwards, he finds his life bound with Hardin's as he falls in love with seductive beauty Amber Rose, frequently used by Hardin as an escort for his rich acquaintances. Ancient sage and recluse William Tell Oliver, who witnessed the elder Nathan's death and has the victim's skull to prove it, steps in to rectify old wrongs when Hardin threatens to kill the young Winer to maintain control over Amber Rose. A haze of mystery hangs over the narrative: voices whisper and strange lights shine from deep within swampy forests, testifying to the presence of a force more powerful than any petty human tyrant. Strange characters inhabit Gay's world, too, like a boy who thinks baby pigs come from underground or a traveling salesman who brags about his largesse but lives off of Winer's mother. Though his dialogue may sometimes be too twangy, Gay writes well-crafted prose that unfolds toward necessary (if occasionally unexpected) conclusions. Enhanced by his feeling for country rhythms and a pervasive, biblical sense of justice, Gay's take on the Southern morality tale is skillfully achieved, if familiar in its scope.

Library Journal

The narrator of this skillfully crafted first novel is an eccentric, introspective loner named Horace, who moves into a rickety house on a dead-end street in a Midwestern town named Oblivion. Although Horace's past and the motivation for his move to Oblivion remain ambiguous, he clearly hopes to find refuge and comfort in this small town. Intelligent and literary, he is also existentially troubled, and the peace he hopes to find proves to be elusive. Horace is philosophical by nature, but this impulse more often than not serves to confound and confuse him. His interactions with the townspeople of Oblivion also prove to be problematic, and although he becomes involved in small ways with a few people there, he sadly remains essentially alone throughout this interesting and thoughtful novel. Recommended for libraries with large modern fiction collections.

--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community-Technical College, CT

Library Journal

The narrator of this skillfully crafted first novel is an eccentric, introspective loner named Horace, who moves into a rickety house on a dead-end street in a Midwestern town named Oblivion. Although Horace's past and the motivation for his move to Oblivion remain ambiguous, he clearly hopes to find refuge and comfort in this small town. Intelligent and literary, he is also existentially troubled, and the peace he hopes to find proves to be elusive. Horace is philosophical by nature, but this impulse more often than not serves to confound and confuse him. His interactions with the townspeople of Oblivion also prove to be problematic, and although he becomes involved in small ways with a few people there, he sadly remains essentially alone throughout this interesting and thoughtful novel. Recommended for libraries with large modern fiction collections.

--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community-Technical College, CT

Washington Post

Months before a novel or work of nonfiction actually appears in the stores, page proofs are sent out by the publisher to booksellers, critics and talk-show hosts. In theory, these literati will pick up the crisp review copy, glance idly at its first page, then find themselves reading with growing excitement, unable to put the volume aside. Rapt with enthusiasm, the book people will talk up the new title, shops will order vast quantities, and critics will line up to write glowing reviews.

Such, anyway, is the fond dream of publisher and author. Most books, though, are brought out to silence or indifference: The world, as Beckett once said, might just as well be deserted.

I don't know how many readers Frederick Reuss's Horace Afoot will attract, but in page proof this first novel deeply impressed two of Washington's most knowledgeable booksellers, impressed them so much in fact that each urged me to take a look at it. "Your kind of book, Dirda," explained one in early June; "Your kind of book, Dirda," said the other in late July. Bristling slightly -- I had always regarded my tastes as eclectic and hard to pin down -- I nevertheless made a mental note to try Horace Afoot.

Happily, Frederick Reuss's novel does turn out to be one of the kinds of books I like. A mysterious stranger walks into a small Midwestern town called Oblivion, rents a house on a whim, and proceeds to puzzle and unsettle most of the local citizenry. For starts, Horace -- short for Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the Roman poet -- won't buy a car: "I hate internal combustion engines and the civilization that has been built on them." Instead he spends much of his time reading philosophical essays and recalling bits of Latin verse, meandering through the countryside around an old Indian mound, or just sitting on his porch:"I have been rocking on the front porch for three days now, and I have discovered something: time passes, and I enjoy having it pass. Inactivity is no easy accomplishment, and finding pleasure in it means overcoming conditioned reflexes. My mind wanders. I permit it to. I try to quiet it, slow it down . . . Now I understand why the newer houses in Oblivion have replaced front porches with rear decks. Porches are for being idle. On decks you entertain yourself to death."

In his utter straightforwardness and simplicity, Horace at first recalls Forrest Gump or Candide. But he is, in fact, more a cousin to one of those dispassionate, existentialist intellectuals, such as Roquentin searching for meaning in Sartre's Nausea or the holy murderer of Thomas Berger's Killing Time. Periodically, Horace dials a random number on his telephone, waits for somebody to pick up, and then begins to ask probing questions about the nature of happiness or the difference between illusion and reality. He regards this practice as the modern equivalent of consulting the Delphic oracle.

Out of intellectual conviction, Horace has determined that the proper goal of life ought to be detachment, autarkeia, "the serenity of not-caring." But life, it turns out, has other, more active, plans for this middle-aged innocent. Gradually, Horace comes to like and admire an elderly librarian, who is slowly dying of cancer. Strolling by a cornfield one afternoon, he looks up from his usual daydream to see a naked woman, bound and gagged, stumbling out from between the stalks. After helping her to a hospital, he finds himself suspected of her rape. A foul-mouthed young hoodlum taunts him, a reporter harasses him, a police detective checks into his past and discovers that he used to call himself William Blake.

Without consciously wanting it, Horace is drawn into the life not of oblivion but of Oblivion. He drives a car, acquires a gun. Most of all, he feels sexually attracted to the assault victim, the desperately unhappy Sylvia. As his confusions and uncertainties mount, he decides to change his name again, this time to Lucian of Samosata, "a satirist -- with a Cynic bent -- who lived to expose shams and phonys."

Questions of identity (the existential "Who am I,?" the practical "Who raped Sylvia?"), meditations on the nature of the world, the growing tugs of love and hate and fear all contribute to the appeal of this quietly entertaining, thought-filled novel. The narrative voice is particularly congenial -- cool and unflappable, often humorous without being laugh-out-loud funny, particularly when Horace reacts to and tries to interpret the events around him. Of course, some red-blooded readers may find the book wispy, diffuse, lacking in surprise. But fans of, say, Carol Shields's new novel, Larry's Party, should check out Reuss's similarly revealing look into a man's soul.