Chocolate Lizards

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Despite his best efforts to make this a madcap, oil-well-drilling, West Texas romp, Thompson's debut novel is an uneven mix of bad jokes, cowboy cliches and unconvincing characters. Erwin Vandeveer is a movie star wannabe from Boston, a spoiled, naive young Harvard grad who was a failure in Hollywood, and who is now stuck in Abilene, Tex., broke and discouraged. Erwin links up with Merle Luskey, a wacky, drunken Texas oilman who is about to lose his drilling business due to a bank foreclosure. The two unlikely partners have just 30 days to strike oil and save the company. Opposed by a crooked banker and a fat, corrupt, sadistic sheriff, Merle and Erwin embark on a string of harebrained schemes to pay off the bad loans and stay solvent. But Merle is an unpredictable lush who gets both of them into trouble--on the order of burglary, forgery, kidnapping and industrial espionage. Aided by an aging tart named Miss Tex-Ann Big-Love and by goofy, porn-loving old cattle rancher Alton Scheermeyer, Merle and Erwin come up with a plan that just might work. The author presents unflattering and unfunny stereotypes of Texans and Yankees alike. Handsome Erwin is just too hoity-toity for the rough and tumble Texas oil fields, and the Texans here are mainly ignorant, foul-mouthed, whiskey-drinking rednecks. Abandoning its early promise of humor and adventure, this story winds up as flat and dry as West Texas itself. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

A debut novel recounting a young man's sudden initiation into the real world—via the oil fields of central Texas. Erwin Vanderveer, like many northeasterners, believes that America is made up of two coasts with nothing terribly interesting in between. A recent Harvard grad who wants to be an actor, Erwin has just spent a profitless year in Hollywood trying to break into the movies. Now he's given up and decided to return home to Boston. Lacking the cash for a plane ticket, he decides to cross the country by bus—which is how he discovers Texas. Unfortunately for Erwin, however, one of his fellow passengers is a card shark who quickly fleeces him of his last dime, stranding him in a rest stop in Abilene. There, he meets Merle Lusky, an oil man who happens to need an extra hand to roughneck on one of his rigs. Merle is like no one Erwin has ever met: Profane and sentimental by turns, he swills whiskey for breakfast and thinks nothing of driving a hundred miles an hour in broad daylight merely to elude the cops. Now, though, the drop in oil prices have hit Merle pretty hard, and the banks are calling in his loans. He stands to lose all six of his rigs unless he can conjure up payback money fast. Merle concocts a scheme to save his skin, but it requires a low profile that's hard to maintain in Abilene's tight-knit oil community. That's where Erwin comes in. As an outsider, he manages to steal confidential information about oil deposits, and soon Merle has staked a claim to a new field that gushes just in time to satisfy the bank. Erwin heads home as planned but not—as he had feared—as a loser. Affable and fun: Thompson's portrayal of an innocent gone (very) farabroad proves irrisestibly readable.