Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302070236
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Jack Always Seeks His Fortune.\ By Donald Davis. August House. $21.95.For the collector of Appalachian folk tales, this book is wonderful. Donald Davis has written down 13 "Jack Tales" in such a way that you feel you are listening to your grandparents or an accomplished storyteller as you read. Jack, as the book's title indicates, is always off to seek his fortune, and each story title begins "The Time Jack . . ."
As Donald Davis explains it, "The sources of these stories . . . [go back] to the generations of storytellers who talked old Jack down through the years and across the miles and the waters from the British highlands to those of North Carolina."
These stories are meant to be told and retold. They are oral, traditional, vivid in description with simple, repetitive plots and structures that were established thousands of years ago. We have heard them in fairy tales, in fables, in hundreds of variations. But they are still the same basic "Jack Tales" that our ancestors and their ancestors enjoyed around the fire and as they worked and as they walked. Donald Davis has written a few of them down so we can "hear" and enjoy them again and again. - MARY SKUTT
Henry James: The Imagination of Genius.\ By Fred Kaplan. Morrow. $25.
In light of the massive biography of Henry James completed in the 1970s by Leon Edel, some would believe that nothing remains to be said. But Edel's biography, great as it is and will continue to be, was too long for many, even in the one-volume condensation Edel did himself a few years later. And for some tastes its endless psychologizing, though interesting, grew tedious.
Kaplan is swifter and more straightforward, and though he adds few facts to the familiar tale, his narration is so sure and his grasp of what is most essential in James so confident that one welcomes his biography.
Kaplan deals briskly with not only James the artist but James the businessman, a writer who lived by his pen and depended upon his stories, novels and journalism to provide him with the comfortable life in which he was happiest, entertaining along the way few romantic illusions about his profession. Kaplan is equally candid about the possibly homoerotic character of James's inner life, yet too sensible to draw from the evidence conclusions the facts do not warrant. He sees in James's character a passion for ambiguity in life as well as art and argues persuasively that ambiguity is the core of James's work while maintaining that no one can know, or probably ever will know, what the "Master's" real affections amounted to. Kaplan also makes a good deal of James's descent, during his last years, into a disillusioned melancholy that - though he remained his usual charming, kindly self on the surface - saw little hope in anything.
- PAXTON DAVIS
Flight.
By Fran Dorf. Dutton. $20.
Fran Dorf's first novel, "A Reasonable Madness," was promising. Her second, "Flight," does not fulfill that promise. The central figure of this illogical story is Lana Paluka. Supposedly she has spent the last 20 years of her life in a "catatonic trance," not a coma, after falling off a cliff or being thrown from it by her boyfriend. Then she awakens, none the worse for her 20-year sojurn. In fact, she looks better than ever and has all her faculties and muscles intact. It gets even stranger when newspaper reporter Jack Wells, who happened to have gone to high school with Lana, returns home to cover this medical miracle.
It would be impossible to summarize the rest of the unbelievable plot twists and coincidences in "Flight," and it's not really worth the time to read or even to think about them. Dorf uses a feather as a recurring motif in "Flight" and that symbolizes what a lightweight effort it is.
- JUDY KWELLER
Last Man To Die.
By Michael Dobbs. HarperCollins. $20.
"What if?" Novelists of modern history never seem to tire of asking that question, despite the fact that the events that actually happened are, in many cases, still hard enough to believe. That's the trouble with "Last Man To Die," a well- written book with a who-cares plot.
At issue is a former German soldier out to make sure Hitler and his bunch really don't get away with it, even though the Russians have all but squashed Berlin flat already. Throw in a budding Irish Republican Army terrorist (female) and a love affair with Eva Braun, Hitler's last-minute wife, and things get stretched just too thin.
It's all part of a trend, it seems. With the Russian bad guys all out of the way, at least for now, the novelists of international intrigue have to have something to write about. Even if they have to dig it up.
- ROBERT HILLDRUP
Mary Skutt is a Lexington writer.\ Paxton Davis's most recent book is "A Boy No More."\ Judy Kweller is vice president of an advertising agency.\ Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.