Allusions to Joyce fill this sprawling (confusing), colorful (overwritten), mythic (contrived), vigorous (capricious) novel. It is often reminiscent, too, of epics by Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Allende and Vargas Llosa. But the author of Ironweed, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game seems unaware that Albany, N.Y., his familiar setting, hardly compares with Ireland, Mexico, Peru or Chile for anthropological or archaeological riches. Nor does Kennedy's fictional family, the Phelans, embody profound human experience as he seems to think.
The 292-page saga centers on Peter Phelan, a moderately successful painter, and his illegitimate novelist son, Orson. Orson narrates, devoting much of his attention to his wife, Giselle, whom he meets in Germany in the '50s while serving in the Army. Orson also devotes much time to an exegesis of his father's paintings. Despite a Phelan family tree in the frontispiece, it is still hard to keep all the characters straight.
Nor is Kennedy stingy with his prose, never using one phrase where a dozen will do. In fact, the novel itself comes to resemble a particularly fantastic part of the Phelan family history. Considering it, Peter detects "the presence of a particular kind of thought, a superstitious atmosphere aswirl with those almost visible demons and long-forgotten abstractions of evil—votive bats and sacrificial hags, burning flesh and the bones of tortured babies—the dregs of putrefied religion, the fetid remains of a psychotic social order, these inheritances so tortuous to his imagination that he had to paint them to be rid of them."
While Kennedy's characters obsess about emotional hollowness (the book is rife with various uses of the word "hollow"), it is no hollow vessel. On the contrary, it is a cup that runneth over—runneth all over the place, in fact. (Viking, $22)
by Francine Prose
Prose's wickedly funny eighth novel is set among the trendy upper-middle-class denizens of New York's mid-Hudson valley. These ironically named primitive people more than earn their comeuppance in the course of a narrative that skillfully combines the gothic, the grotesque and the glib into a bizarre comedy of ill manners.
Into the midst of this highbrow Ha-des-on-the-Hudson comes Simone, an educated 25-year-old Haitian woman. She takes charge of two children, George and Maisie, whose daft, self-absorbed mother, Rosemary, has been recently separated from her wealthy, philandering husband, Geoffrey. The emotional havoc that this split and its consequences engender in the children surfaces in George's morbid obsession with watching a video on Eskimo seal-slaughtering and Maisie's equally dark fascination with burying spent light bulbs in the backyard.
While Simone is the novel's main observer, the children serve as its moral center and chief victims, around whom the nominal adults conduct their sexual battles and betrayals.
With savage wit and stiletto-sharp dialogue, Prose performs the literary equivalent of a vivisection on Hudson Landing's hipper-than-thou artists and socialites. Besides Rosemary, a would-be sculptor whose current project is a series of obese female goddesses carved in pumice, and the wily Geoffrey, there's a narcissistic hairdresser named Kenny, a sheep-sacrificing Count, a homeopathic veterinarian and his bovine WASP bride, and Rosemary's best friend, Shelly, an interior decorator whose ulterior designs have more to do with her clients than their houses.
Only death seems to hold anyone's genuine interest and attention. Like a potent flowering garland it weaves through the book, connecting the characters one to the other in a menacing embrace. Here a laugh is as good as a scream and horror is as commonplace as a hug. Everyone gets out alive, but then they must go on living, with the newly rekindled awareness that to not perish is, funnily, to invite more peril. (Farrar Straus Giroux, $20)
by Robert Crais
He's a walking handbook of pop culture, right down to his name: Elvis Cole. ("Christ," mutters the guard at Paramount studios, "I remember a time you said 'Elvis,' there was only one.") A Pinocchio clock decorates his office wall, a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt his chest. But the freshest face among fictional private eyes of course hides behind a sarcastic aside.
Like Robert Parker's Spenser, Crais's Elvis comes with a high cholesterol count and a mysterious "associate," in this case gun-shop owner Joe Pike. And like any detective worth his uncollected fee, Elvis—star of two previous mysteries, The Monkey's Raincoat and Stalking the Angel—is always getting fired. In Lullaby Town, he is retained by the infantile billionaire movie director Peter Alan Nelsen, who suffers a sudden, belated urge to play papa. Trouble is, his wife and kid disappeared a decade ago.
Finding them is easy—as Elvis, never one to mystify his work, points out: "People don't usually change their names and move to the Amazon.... people own cars and driver's licenses and social security numbers." But once found, Karen Nelsen, now Karen "Lloyd" Shipley, is in more than a bathtub full of hot water. A Connecticut bank officer, she has for years been quietly transferring money for the mob.
Elvis's attempt to rescue Karen and her son, Toby, leads him to some extremely seedy New York City nightspots and to another great Crais character: retired NYC police detective Rollie George, now a best-selling crime novelist. Crais deserves a comparable success. His Cole is lean, mean and completely lovable—a worthy successor to Spenser and Fletch. (Bantam, $20)
>BRIGHT SHARK by Robert Ballard and Tony Chin
The real heroes of this deep-sea techno-thriller are Bert and Ernie, the camera-equipped robots who do the sleuthing three miles down.
Thirty-eight nautical miles off Crete, an American research ship, Fanning II, is conducting a geophysical study when it comes upon what may be the wreckage of Dakar, an Israeli submarine that vanished in 1968. Washington intelligence is bent on uncovering the sunken sub's secret cargo. Israel, on the other hand, is even more determined to keep the cargo forever concealed—even if it means burying the American ship along with it.
Written by Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the Titanic, and Chiu, a frequent PEOPLE contributor, Bright Shark teems with authentic underwater salvage detail. The book cuts back and forth cinematically: Washington. Moscow. Jerusalem. Athens. An Israeli sub ready to attack. And always back to Fanning II's monitors as they reveal, little by little, Dakar's secrets. (Delacorte, $20)
FAME'S PERIL by Martha Smilgis
A superstar director on exotic location is having an affair with his leading lady while his wife a "serious actress who has never really cottoned to Hollywood—is sleeping with an over-the-hill country singer. Meanwhile a heartland Mary Hart wannabe is learning some hard lessons from her Geraldo-esque boss. Smilgis, a former PEOPLE Los Angeles bureau chief, knows these characters well, and her eavesdropping on Hollywood insincerity can be devilishly entertaining as she plots her debut novel around the kidnapping of the director's young son. "Despite his gnawing despair," she writes of the director, "he felt considerably better after yesterday's conference call with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg." (Pocket, $19)
BENEDICT CANYON by Laura Van Warmer
Van Wormer's novels are at once chatty and flat, knowledgeable and banal. Her inside track on TV personalities and pursuits made Riverside Drive and West End fairly vivid. This story of a semitroubled young editor going after the autobiography of a semitroubled TV star, also profits from the author's knowing take on publishing politics. But the book often sinks into a Recovery Chasm as too many characters battle too many trendy addictions. (Crown, $20)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Lisa Shea,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Carol Peace,
- Sara Nelson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
