allahan's Place was destroyed by a nuclear blast back in Callahan's Secret. Its successor, Mary's Place, was destroyed by an act of bureaucracy after proprietor Jake Stonebender offended a bureaucrat's relative in Callahan's Legacy. When 133-year-old inventor Nikola Tesla returns from the future to talk to Jake about yet another mission to save the universe, Jake puts his foot down--the freewheeling, pun-nurturing, freak-fostering Perfect Bar is dead, its patrons are scattered, its founder has gone back to his homeworld, and the situation is hopeless. Events have conspired to ensure that Jake will never run a bar on Long Island again.
So, suggests a series of wild coincidences--the kind that could happen only around a select group of Callahan's regulars--why stay on Long Island at all? Why not re-open the bar somewhere else, where the weather and the locals are more congenial and the atmosphere's more conducive to the experiment in human telepathy that Jake and his friends have intermittently become? Why not find a den of friendly freaks somewhere and move in?
A few dozen pages later, the Callahan's crew does just that. They saddle up a flotilla of converted school buses; pack up the pookah, the talking dog, the supergenius toddler, the apelike piano savant and all the rest of the regulars; and head down to Key West. More than half of this latest installment in the Callahan's series follows the pack's sloppy, cheerful road trip from New York to Florida. This includes their arrival, their exploration of Key West and Jake's mental maunderings along the way (on topics ranging from Robert Heinlein to John D. MacDonald to the hapless schmoes whom he uncharitably denigrates for not appreciating his first in-person space shuttle launch to the extent and in the precise way that he does).
Eventually, of course, things finally settle down, and then it's back to the base problem of how to avert the destruction of the entire universe.
Unfortunately, this time around, Jake and the gang have to figure out what the actual threat is first.
Not a lot of plot, but a lot of fun
As Key starts, the central cliffhanger hovering throughout the entirety of Callahan's Legacy has finally been resolved--offstage and in a few sentences. This offhand approach neatly sums up Robinson's intermittent treatment of plot as a nuisance, something often destined to be glossed over so he can get to the fun bits: the puns, the anecdotes, the shaggy-dog tales, the homages and the didactic lectures. (Among the many rabbit trails this time around: a polemic on the wonders of Disneyland, a detailed description of Key West street entertainment and an extended guest appearance by Pixel, Robert Heinlein's Cat Who Walks Through Walls.)
Still, Key has more of a central plot than any of the last several Callahan's books. More to the point, it has more heart, more joy and more honest fun. The usual construction flaws are in evidence--Robinson whipsaws around his characters' emotional states, producing and then healing heart-rending traumas in the space of a few pages. He portrays most non-Callahaners as cretinous goobers, prone to violence or idiocy, and just begging for Jake and company's self-righteous abuse. He mimics Heinlein, right down to the female character whose nipples "stand up" when she's happy. But even at his most self-indulgent, he's still recklessly silly and endearingly sincere. His heart's always in the right place--and here for once it actually seems to be focused on the book, unlike the somewhat mechanical feeling of the last two Callahan's novels.
Robinson's characters only come in two varieties: black hats or white.
His endings are always happy, his characters' broken hearts are always fixable and, in the end, all's guaranteed to be right with his worlds. He's no longer the breathtaking, groundbreaking, soul-searching writer he was in the late '70s and early '80s, but he's still comfortingly kind and he knows how to spin a catchy, involving yarn. Callahan's Key knits together many different yarns at once into a big cozy afghan that isn't entirely pretty. But it's warm, familiar and looks like it was made with love.
