Alex the Great

There's a particular kind of American humor that emerges when innocence meets ambition in a concrete jungle, and H. C. Witwer mastered it. Meet Alex Hanley, a wide-eyed Vermonter who arrives in 1920s New York City convinced that fortune simply awaits anyone brave enough to reach for it. Armed with nothing but charm, determination, and a spectacular lack of knowledge about how anything actually works, Alex proceeds to stumble through the metropolis like a bull in a subway turnstile. His bemused cousin serves as both guide and witness to the spectacle. What unfolds is a comedy of errors that feels remarkably contemporary: a fish-out-of-water story where the fish doesn't realize he's out of water until he's already dry-docked on Fifth Avenue. Witwer's prose crackles with the rapid-fire wit of an era that knew how to mock ambition without killing it. Alex isn't a fool exactly, but he's a man whose confidence exists in inverse proportion to his experience. For readers who love Mark Twain's railroad-comedy sensibility, this novel offers the same delighted cynicism about the gap between dreams and reality. It's for anyone who believes (or once believed) that moxie might be enough.