Down Under

DOWN UNDER is a serio-comic faux biography of a famous actor, Colm Eriksen, who declines from virile international screen star to aging, paranoid wreck. The novel creates a backstory in which the iconic hero, born as Collum Whitsun, grows up poor and battered in upstate New York, the only light in his life a fellow high school sophomore—the bourgeois, Jewish Judy Pincus. Judy and Collum fall passionately into young love, but she abandons him when his father decides to whisk the family off to Australia. Decades later, Collum, a fallen angel with nothing to lose, returns to settle scores with or renew his lost romance. The love of his youth, now a woman in middle-aged, married torpor, meets him more than halfway.