In the fall of 1940 a 40-year-old spinster named Iris James goes to visit a Boston doctor. She wants a written document attesting that she is, as the book says, "intact." The lucky recipient of the letter will be Harry Vale, a mechanic who smells of axle grease and Old Spice and has a crypto-sexual fetish of his own. It concerns the height of the flagpole in Franklin, the small Cape Cod town where he and Iris both live.By Sarah Blake