Quick cuts

Abbreviating Ernie is long on humor

by Charles Taylor

By Peter Lefcourt. Villard, 301 pages, $23.

If there's a sweeter-tempered comic writer than Peter Lefcourt currently at work, I don't know who it is. Lefcourt's first three novels -- The Deal, The Dreyfus Affair, and Di and I -- were romantic wish-fulfillment fantasies. His new novel, Abbreviating Ernie, is wish-fulfillment, too -- in a way. The difference is that what the characters want is a lot less romantic and a lot less kind-hearted.

Inspired by the O.J. circus (and, to a lesser extent, by the Lorena Bobbitt case), Abbreviating Ernie is the first Lefcourt book that could reasonably be called cynical. Even Lefcourt's cynicism, though, doesn't have much nastiness in it. He's cynical in the way characters were in '30s comedy -- what used to be called wised-up. And even amid this utterly ordinary fantasia of nutcases and vultures, cops and robbers, tabloid reporters nosing for a scoop and career-climbing lawyers angling for that perfect sound bite, Lefcourt includes two characters who rise above it to find true love. As American pop novelists go, Lefcourt is an almost perfect companion: a smart-ass with one ear cocked for the strains of swoony violins.

Ernie is Dr. Ernest Haas, a Schenectady urologist who's got a thriving practice, an expensive car, a plush suburban home, and a size-eight wardrobe he shares with his wife, Audrey. Shortly after the book opens, Ernie starts off his weekend by bringing home Chinese takeout, then having sex with Audrey while she's handcuffed to the kitchen stove and he's dressed in a beige knit suit, yellow silk blouse, and white open-toed shoes. Audrey, who spends most of her time happily floating through life on Prozac, doesn't mind. She only hopes they'll finish in time for her to watch a TV-movie with Meredith Baxter playing a woman suing a doctor for performing a wrongful hysterectomy. She never makes it.

Things are just getting going when Ernie has a massive coronary and dies, in flagrante. Stuck -- literally -- and hysterical, Audrey breaks the matrimonial bond with the aid of one of the few things within reach: a Sunbeam electric carving knife. By the time the cops arrive (they've been tipped off by an anonymous fax sent by Emmanuel Longhouse, a deaf-mute Mohawk burglar who breaks into the house and happens upon dead, dickless Ernie and the still-handcuffed Audrey), Audrey is near-catatonic. Ernie's recent loss may or may not have been disposed of by the couple's hungry Rottweiler, and the police assume Audrey has killed her husband.

That's just the first 30 or so pages. In the ensuing trial, accusations and book deals fly. The district attorney wants to paint Audrey as a cold-blooded killer; Audrey's feminist lawyer wants the case to be a landmark affirmation that will prove the Fourteenth Amendment applies to women, and Audrey just wants to be left alone with her Prozac and TV-movies (which run to the likes of A Mother's Anguish: The Yvonne Shapiro Story, in which Valerie Bertinelli stars as a mother who discovers her adopted child has sickle-cell anemia; those gags are even funnier if you know that Lefcourt scripts TV movies).

The book's overarching joke might seem an obvious one, but Lefcourt gets a lot of mileage from it: not only does the truth never really come out, but no one is all that interested in it. Poor zonked Audrey gets lost in the shuffle. It's easier for Lefcourt to joke about what goes on here because no one is really hurt (Ernie has gone to that great Loehmann's in the sky by the time he's foreshortened). But he can be take-no-prisoners sharp about the motives of the people circling around Audrey. He's got an ability to nail characters by their clothes or cars that is dead-on without being smug. Both Lefcourt's savvy and his Rube Goldberg plotting, with every action setting a new element in motion, might remind you of Carl Hiassen's Florida-based crime novels. Lefcourt is gentler, though.

Lefcourt's open secret is that he's something of a square. Paradise, as his books define them, is middle-class and reassuringly familiar. He's the type of guy who'd be charmed by the sight of a middle-aged couple holding hands as they make the circuit around the shopping mall. The dogged police detective slogging his way through the case only wants to retire with his girlfriend. And the People correspondent who's shuffled the clichés of his trade around one time too many sees his way out in the person of a lilac-scented Hard Copy reporter who he suspects is as sick of the business as he is. If there are any heroes in Abbreviating Ernie, it's these two. While everyone else is trying to put the pieces of the story together and see what emerges, these lovers are the only ones who realize that what it adds up to is much less than "Bibbity Bobbity Boo."