Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301100150
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Sleeping Dogs.By Thomas Perry. Random House. $22.
Ten years ago, Thomas Perry won an Edgar award for his novel, "The Butcher's Boy," about a mob hitman forced to take extended revenge on his employers. The character returns in this engaging and exceptionally well-written thriller.
It begins in England where the Butcher's Boy, now calling himself Michael Shaeffer, is living in happy, quiet anonymity. He thinks that he has made a clean break from his violent past and has even set up housekeeping with The Honourable Meg. But then she and some of her friends persuade him to come with them to the races at Brighton. There he's spotted by an ambitious young American gangster who knows that bringing in the Butcher's Boy would give his career a boost in the right direction. He decides to go for a quick kill, and the bloody chase is on.
Perry maneuvers a large cast of well-drawn characters through a complicated, far-ranging plot. Shaeffer returns to America to find out who is out to get him, never realizing how large a role sheer chance is playing in his life. That's what raises "Sleeping Dogs" above the usual level of the genre. Perry never allows the mechanics of the plot to overshadow the world of bizarre fate and luck that he has created. Here, plans often are based on completely false assumptions, and even when they work properly, the results are unpredictable, at best. The conclusion is letter-perfect.
Oddly, "Sleeping Dogs" hasn't gotten the attention it deserves, but it's not too late to discover a real treat.
- MIKE MAYO, Book page editor
The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy.
By Frederick Crews. Random House. $20.
Most critics read literature with either a bunker or debunker mentality. Those with the bunker outlook, the new critics and canonizers such as E.D. Hirsch, see great writers as a priesthood of Western values and view themselves as defenders of the faith. The debunkers, Marxists and deconstructionists for example, see literature (texts) either as undermining Western values (prejudices) or as undermining itself (cross out itself and insert something else). Frederick Crews, author of "The Pooh Perplex," has made a reputation wrestling literature away from the professionals and returning it to individual readers.
In "The Critics Bear It Away," he applies his skill to Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor and Updike. Consisting mainly of material previously published in The New York Review of Books, the collection of essays will be especially useful to English teachers, caught as they are in the crossfire between opposing critical camps and frequently called upon to make sense of the fray.
- PETER CROW
The Stars Shine Down.
By Sidney Sheldon. Morrow. $23.
What can you say about Sidney Sheldon? He has written 12 best-selling novels, screenplays for 23 movies and has created four long-running television series. I'd say the man knows what the public wants to read and see. And he does an expert job in delivering it. "The Stars Shine Down" is another captivating novel. This one's politically correct too, as the hero is the lovely and feminine Lara Cameron who appears out of nowhere to become a contemporary real estate magnate. Along the way, she manages to destroy several people, comes close to being destroyed herself by several others, and, in general, packs several lifetimes of adventure into less than three score years.
If you're a Sheldon fan, you already know that his characters and his plots will not define reality with all its warts and superfluous body hair, but who needs reality when he can produce such well-written escapism?
- JUDY KWELLER
Lamar Archaeology: Mississippi Chiefdoms In the Deep South.
Edited by Mark Williams and Gary Shapiro. University of Alabama Press. $19.95.
The Mississippian period represents the apogee of eastern American Indian cultural development. Flourishing from 1,000 to 1,600 A.D., Mississippian cultures were already in decline when European contact became established. In "Lamar Archaeology," the editors pull together 11 case studies to synthesize and update the collective archaeological files on this twilight period of prehistory, with heavy emphasis on the area of coastal and piedmont Georgia and South Carolina. Featured are examinations of Indian architecture, ecology, diet, burial customs, myriad pottery patterns and societal organization. The process of chiefly succession and speculations as to the demise of these highly evolved and complex chiefdoms are of value to any student of southern Appalachian prehistory.
- PETE DAVIS
Peter Crow teaches English at Ferrum College.\ Judy Kweller is vice president of an advertising agency.\ Pete Davis is a columnist for the Lexington News-Gazette.