FICTION

THE TALE MAKER by Mark Harris (Donald J. Fine; $21; 215 pp.). Rimrose, the occasionally admirable writer who stars in “The Tale Maker,” has one major goal in life; “to keep every story at home until it was absolute done.” And much of the time he succeeds, for a good portion of Mark Harris’ 13th novel takes place in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s, when short stories were published in numerous major magazines. Times get tougher, however, and Rimrose’s more-or-less idyllic life comes a cropper: the stories don’t come, the phone doesn’t ring and Rimrose finds himself essentially broke. Rimrose is desperate enough to consider taking a salaried job--at his father’s newspaper, at his alma mater’s mysteriously powerful information agency, at another, distant university--when one Kakapick, a ne’er-do-well acquaintance from Rimrose’s college years, suddenly becomes a respected, powerful academic. He offers Rimrose a high-paid, tenured position, and it is the perfect job--except for the fact that Kakapick remains a manipulative, misanthropic philistine, having come into his own only because he has devised, implausibly, a statistical, supposedly objective scale for ranking fiction writers. Harris, best known for “Bang the Drum Slowly,” has written a light comic novel on the never-ending war between trusting writers and cynical critics, and sometimes it works, as when Rimrose’s mother pronounces that her son is “going to be one of the great writers that never drank.” Much of the time, though, “The Tale Maker” falls flat, for Harris doesn’t go in for the wicked, Waugh-like satire that his plotting seems to require. Cretins like Kakapick are indeed capable of ascending to positions of responsibility through naked ambition and sheer luck, but neither Rimrose’s last-minute resistance to his would-be mentor, nor Kakapick’s eventual comeuppance, is particularly satisfying.