Tod Wodicka
All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well;
and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.
Pantheon, 272 pages, $21.95.

One winter, years ago, I quaffed too much of a certain
potation and woke up the next morning, like Twain’s
Connecticut Yankee, back in days of old. The elixir was
nothing magical, of course, and the mechanism of my “time
travel” was simple enough: I slept through a college housing
deadline and had to settle for a room in the “stronghold” or
“keep”—or “physical plant,” as the insurance men joylessly
insisted on calling it—of the campus medievalist group.

This was my first brush with the faire folk, the
mead-drinkers and doublet-stitchers, the ones who spent high
school daydreaming about how a trebuchet full of burning
pitch might liven up the next pep rally. I had hoped it
would be my last, but then came Burt Hecker, the tunic-clad
Quixote of Tod Wodicka’s debut novel All Shall Be Well; and
All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.

Burt owns a quaint bed-and-breakfast in upstate New York,
but his true love is his medieval reenactment society, the
Confraternity of Times Lost Regained. “History, when you
devote your life to it,” he tells
us, “can be either a
weight into a premature old age or a release from the
troublesome, promiscuous present … immaturity as an
occupational boon.” It isn’t always a boon, however; shortly
after we first meet Burt he