M*A*S*H GOES TO MAINE

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Richard Hooker published the novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors in 1968 and saw it turned into a successful film and television series. Although Hooker has indicated that he wasn't a fan of the television series, he did capitalize on its success with the publication of a sequel to his novel, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, which was published in 1972, the year the television show debuted. That novel would be followed by a series of a dozen novels credited to Hooker and William E. Butterworth, but actually written by Butterworth (who found fame as the author W.E.B. Griffin), before Hooker wrote the final book, M*A*S*H Mania, which essentially ingored Butterworth's books.

Reading M*A*S*H Goes to Maine is a strange experience, partly because the main character, Harkeye Pierce, shares certain characteristics with the version of him portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the film and Alan Alda in the television series, but is also a very different character, much less cosmopolitan than either of the media versions. The other main characters, whether returning from the first novel or newly introduced, are barely allows to be defined. Pierce's wife and three children exist in the background, barely showing up. Jocko Allcock and Wooden Leg Wilcox exist to give Hawkeye the impetus to collect his fellow Swampmen and set up their own clinic, but they are hardly rounded characters.

The novel follows his return to his hometown of Crabapple Cove, Maine and his attempts to find a place for himself in the medical community of Spruce Harbor, which includes leaving to train in thoracic surgery. Throughout the novel, he works to bring the Swampmen from MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors back together to create the Finestkind Clinic and Fishmarket, and he manages to snag Duke Forrest, Spearchucker Jones, and eventually Trapper John. The novel is written as a series of episodes, much as the original novel, and has a tendency to focus on the strange denizens of Spruce Harbor and its environs, from the inept physicians and hospital administrators to the strangely inbred Finch-Brown clan. It is a world in which everyone gets a nickname and you can easily tell the competency of an individual based on Hawkeye's (and therefore the rest of the Swampmen's) opinions of them.

M*A*S*H Goes to Maine is not a great novel. It really reads more like a series of connected short stories. Aside from Hawkeye Pierce, the familiar characters from the earlier book essentially make cameos (Duke's dog, Little Eva, plays a bigger role in the novel than Duke does). Furthermore, there is a casual racism throughout the book which may have been reflective of the 1950s, when the novel is set, or even the 1970s, when it was written, but which feel jarring and occasionally unnecessary when the novel is read from a twenty-first century point of view.

The subsequent Butterworth novels appropriated the M*A*S*H Goes to... title template, sending the characters to New Orleans, Texas, Montreal, and nine other places, but they are more broadly farcical than M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, which tends to suffer from its association with those novels, which often attempt to parody the political and social conventions of the 1970s by using the characters Hooker created (as well as Butterworth's own). M*A*S*H Goes to Maine is no masterpiece of literature, but it does deserve to stand or fall by its own content. To that end it is a rather thin book that can't capture the success of its more famous cinematic and televised cousins.

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