The Rough English Equivalent [Paperback]

Stan Hayes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 19, 2002

In 1946, a strapping, steel-eyed New Yorker punctures Bisque (BIS-kew), Georgia's self-satisfied small-town stupor. Moses Kubielski's steaming Buick limousine has stranded him there, and Jack Mason escorts the exotic stranger to Hotel Bisque, introducing him to his mother Serena, the manager. Poleaxed by desire, Moses pursues her Yankee-style, buying a movie house on the spot and giving notice that, for him, the "old ways" are just that.Committed to returning to New York and succeeding as a sculptor, Serena deflects Moses' marriage proposal, and passion gives way to a sex-sprinkled friendship. Moses and her father become partners in a beer distributorship, and he settles onto the fringe of Bisque's bourgeoisie. Gradually assuming a pivotal role in Jack's life, he shows him, time and again, how a finger is stuck in the eye of the establishment.As tightening security around the plutonium-spawning Savannah River Project threatens to reveal his past, Moses dusts off the skills he acquired as an espionage agent to insure that the fruits of his Bisque burghership are secured for the boy. Jack, not yet twenty, joins the man he's come to love in the commission of a crime that promises to make him rich.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

After duty over much of the world with the Hurricane Hunters and MATS, Stan Hayes found corporate striving in New York was hazardous to his health . A growing distrust of organizations much larger than family-size sent him to Atlanta, a career in public relations and other tellings of tales.

Product Details

• Paperback: 648 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (November 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059524579X
• ISBN-13: 978-0595245796
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,783,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thanks for checking in to the wild world of Jack Mason! I began writing the Saga after tempting fate as a Navy Hurricane Hunter, Ph.D. candidate and PR man. It begins with Jack's taking the form of a massless force field and returning to his boyhood from the year 4231. He's the son of Serena Mason, a sculptor who, sick of Los Alamos, abandons her husband, a Manhattan Project physicist, via a long bus ride with Jack to her rural Georgia hometown. On the trip, time-traveler Jack appears to his boyhood self as a Goshawk, greeting him telepathically. By the time they reach Georgia, the boy/bird bonding is firm, giving young Jack welcome support as he begins a life far different from the New York of his early childhood. Serena, meanwhile, adjusts to her new life as manager of her father's hotel.

The loneliness of Jack's fatherless childhood is relieved by the arrival of Moses Kubielski, a former German spy who, in time, becomes Serena's lover, her father's business partner and Jack's boyhood mentor. On a trip to New York in 1952, Moses introduces Jack to Linda Green, a former lover's daughter, who promptly seduces 16-year-old Jack, beginning their fateful affair. Later, Moses' reunion with a KGB agent leads to a faked-death plot involving both Linda and Jack, including a will making young Jack both a multimillionaire and an accessory to fraud. In 1959, the plotters reunite in Miami after Moses' and Linda's escape from Castro's Cuba. They're soon off and running again, head-on into the JFK assassination and joining Jesus as passengers on a UFO! What could possibly top that? You'll see next year, with the debut of the Saga's Book III!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Spy, the Sculptress and the Kid, July 23, 2004

By 

Fast Buck "Fast Buck" (Pensacola, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rough English Equivalent (Paperback)

What a case of bottom english! Ex-Abwehr agent steals millions, has his postwar flight to Cuba interrupted when his Buick limo breaks down in cracker country. Porque? Why, for the oldest reason in the chronicles of humankind; a fine, fine woman who's grossly misunderstood, and, naturally, underappreciated.

I'm convinced that Mr. Hayes either grew up in a town like Bisque, or drank a lot with someone who did. His place descriptions, characterizations and ear for dialect are just too spot-on for this reviewer to believe otherwise.

Bring it on, Stan; we need more of Bisque and Hamm County, which bids fair to be appreciated as nothing less than Yoknapatawpha East!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Great Speckled Bird, July 5, 2004

By 

Dee (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rough English Equivalent (Paperback)

This story has quite a few memorable characters, not the least of whom is Flx the Goshawk. Befriending Jack on the first day that he's separated from his Father, he remains his supernatural sounding board- or is he an alter ego?... throughout the years of his growing up. On whichever side of this question you may decide to come down, I'll bet that you end up wishing that you'd had a Flx of your own to guide you through the pitfalls of growing up, to say nothing of the mentoring of a resourceful ex-Nazi spy!

Hayes doesn't exactly hit you over the head with his message, as DeLillo or Pynchon are wont to do, but it comes through loud and clear if you look closely at what this blockbuster-sized book has to say. To wit, sex is a deadly sort of fun, God is a fig newton of far too many people's imaginations, and life's too short to pussyfoot around. I write this having just reread The Rough English Equivalent's 600+ pages to make sure that I'd really "gotten it," and it was so much fun that I'll probably do it again before the summer's out. As a woman, I found myself applauding Rini's independence and wishing that I were as tough as Diana, the kick-ass psychic nympho twin. And if you're a pilot, as I am, you'll get a kick out of flying the J-3 Cub and the old Grumman F3F fighter with Jack, Moses and Gene Debs!

This is, excuse my French, a hell of a book; to that point, I can't give it five stars because I'm at odds with Mr. Hayes' atheistic subtext. I suppose that's akin to a feminist downing the cromagnon philosophy of John Wayne, which I do, and still admiring his Sgt. Stryker of Sands of Iwo Jima, which one must. If I could, I'd give the book 4 1/2 stars, but since I can't, it gets a very enthusiastic FOUR!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, well rounded -- a complete story! Refreshing!, March 15, 2004

By 

Jason E. Smith "JES" (Savannah, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rough English Equivalent (Paperback)

Having chanced across this book's web site during a Google search, I bought it on the strength of Thomas Mcguane's endorsement. His off-center humor's been a longtime addiction of mine, and I figured that if he got "hours of amusement" from it, so would I. Well, I didn't know what I was getting myself into; this guy Hayes' mind certainly shares a quirk or two with McGuane's, but they definitely feed in different pastures. The Rough English Equivalent shares tones of alienation and rebellion with McGuane's work, especially the early books, but its humor's at once darker and more hopeful than the wide-open-space bleakness of which McGuane is the master. This novel, which I think is Hayes's first, has a decidedly urban cast, with airplanes and motorcycles serving in the roles of McGuane's beloved horseflesh.

Enough comparisons; what we have here is a bordering-on-black comedy set in post-World War II Bisque, Georgia, hard by the Savannah River Project plutonium plant. The Rough English Equivalent spans a decade in the lives of Serena, the striking, sensual, estranged wife of Manhattan Project scientist and a Bisque bigwig's daughter, who's itching to trade motherhood and the live-in management of her father's hotel for a sculptor's loft in New York. Jack, her ferociously apt son, puberty just around the corner, is shadowed by a Goshawk that only he can see. Having only sporadic contact with his father, he grows up in Hotel Bisque under the iconoclastic tutelage of burly Jewish entrepreneur Moses, who's actually Peter, a onetime Luftwaffe pilot, late of German intelligence, who sat out the war in Baltimore after walking away with three million bucks earmarked for Roosevelt's and Churchill's 1941 IRA assassination aboard USS Augusta. Stranded en route to Cuba by a ruptured radiator, he gets a load of Serena and drops anchor.

As they craft a modus viviendi, these characters smite Bisque's small-town sensibilities hip and thigh, careening down a collision course with destiny. Probing their psyches and the circumstances that shaped them, Hayes cracks the citadel of Bisque's bigoted bourgeoisie, delivering episodes that include Moses adjourning a Klan cross-burning with bazooka fire, Serena swapping his 1950 Buick's hood ornament for a replica sporting a slickly-chromed penis modeled by the sculptor from life, Jack seduced at 16 by Moses' old lover's daughter aboard a sailboat in New York Harbor and, last but not least, the Bishop sisters, psychic twins possessed by Tourette Syndrome and nymphomania, using Moses' old white limousine to stalk him, driving him nuts with implications that they know who he really is.

Increasingly restless in his Bisque sojourn, Moses fakes his death in a plane crash off the Georgia coast, goes to Havana, and all too soon joins his old Mafia cronies in flight from the Castro revolution. Jack and Moses reunite in Miami's Coconut Grove, awash in CIA types and Cuban exiles, notably Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker, gearing up for the Bay of Pigs.

This is a rich, rich piece of work. The web site quotes a reviewer as saying that it's a cross between John Irving and Louis Grizzard, and I guess I could agree with that. I could also go on, but recalling McGuane's verdict that The Rough English Equivalent's "...funny and wonderfully energetic," I'll close this out by telling you just one more thing. It's an Altman movie screaming to be made!