FICTION

LETTERS OF A LOVE-HUNGRY FARMER by John B. Keane (St. Martin’s: $10.95; 88 pp.) Meet John Bosco McLane, Irish farmer, 52, named for a soon-to-be saint. Unmarried. Very unmarried. “An innocent sort of a man,” they say in the hill country between Kerry and Cork. A chastitute. That’s what Father Kennerley calls him. “The whole countryside is reeking of chastitution,” snorts the parish priest. “There isn’t the making of a dacent sin in the entire doings of the lot o’ you.”

Meet John B. Keane, if you haven’t already (your loss). Novelist; playwright; publican; sage; bard of the bittersweet and the bawdy. A man who knows. It’s taken 20 years for “Letters” to reach these benighted shores, and it’s been worth the wait. Not for John Bosco, though. “He is without a wife, mistress or regular copulatory companion.” He needs a woman. Now. A friend advises him to dig deeper for the local potatoes. Another suggestion: observe the greasy city Lotharios in action: “That’s how Dempsey became world champion, watching others when he was a gorsoon. And there’s the local matchmmaker, a many-splendored fellow named Dicky Mick Dicky O’Connor, who signs his correspondence “Courtesy and Civility assured at all times.”

John Bosco’s luck remains rotten. One prospective companion, having divorced an impotent cawboge , demands a photo of Bosco in the buff, to assure that “your natural belongings are intact.” Another, this one with all her teeth, turns out to be pregnant, by her brother, who also fancies hens. A third, finding the farmer too timid, delivers the Gaelic equivalent of Dear John, to wit: “Shag you from a height.” Will John Bosco find a woman? Is the Pope Italian? More important, will St. Martin’s release some more Keane? Please?