Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 27, 1994 TAG: 9402200132
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Trey Ellis. Simon & Schuster. $21.
Austin McMillan has no luck with women. Not that he doesn't have plenty of opportunities. Austin knows lots of women, has women around him much of the time, appears moderately attractive to women. So what's his problem? The novel _ funny and fast- moving as it is _ doesn't adequately explain. Sure, he's overly obsessed by sex and considers himself nerdy (though his descriptions of muscle building suggest nobody is going to kick sand in his face). As a black student at a predominantly white prep school, his biggest disappointment is his virginity. But anyone with as many chances to lose it as Austin has will probably succeed long before he does.
Throughout college and into a successful career as host of a home repairs TV show, the preoccupation with sex continues - even as his luck in the bedroom takes a turn for the better. The novel calls desperately for home repairs to his attitude toward women. Unfortunately, they come too suddenly and too near the end to be convincing. At least to me. Such, however, was not the case with my father who generally confines his reading to mail order catalogs and the sports page. He couldn't put the book down. But then, he's 83 and doesn't concern himself with the finer points of motivation, or whether an author thinks the Trojan horse concealed Trojans (as Ellis apparently does).
- PETER CROW
Pictures at an Exhibition.
By D.M. Thomas Scribner's. $22.
The obscurities of D.M. Thomas's writing and the intricacy of his story in "Pictures at an Exhibition" could be interpreted as playfulness except his subject is Auschwitz, the game board is the anguished mind and the function of pieces is to enact contradictions inherent in the nature of humankind. This is no lighthearted contest.
Amidst the backdrop of dreadful atrocities, a Jewish doctor, Chaim Galewski, attempts to treat an S.S. officer, Dr. Lorenz, who suffers from severe headaches and nightmares. Sessions of psychoanalysis and letters of political posturing give way to scenes of analysis 50 years later in London. An elderly psychoanalyst and his wife, patients and friends become embroiled in a bizarre intertwining of relationships. A cathartic combination of events reveals their connection to Auschwitz and the inescapable impact of the past.
Thomas effectively juxtaposes the normalities of life with its horrors, and renders the simultaneous compassionate and dispassionate dichotomies within individuals. The highest accomplishments of mankind in literature, poetry, art and music share pages with its most despicable actions. Like a clever analyst, Thomas himself withholds explanation while revealing truths. Granted, truth may be hard to find and even harder to face, but greater clarity would enhance the accessibility of his story writing; he teasingly obscures the identities of characters and the essence of events until the puzzle becomes frustrating and the cause is lost.
"Pictures at an Exhibition" does have lasting power, but it could have had even more.
- MARY ANN JOHNSON
Decider. By Dick Francis. G.P. Putnam's Sons. $22.95. We're Off to See the Killer. By William Murray. Doubleday. $18.50.
If you don't know Dick Francis by now, with 30-something best-selling mystery novels to his credit, you're either very young or not a mystery reader. With "We're Off to See the Killer," his seventh novel featuring Shifty Lou Anderson, William Murray is a piker by comparison. It is, nevertheless, a comparison invited by the publishers, who claim Murray is the American Francis. Not by a furlong. The common denominator that both Francis and Murray use horse racing as central themes. After that, however, it's more contrast than likeness.
"We're Off to See the Killer" struck this reader as no better than an average effort. It's American-ness, alas, lies in its flaws: too much banal violence, the mistaken assumption that dreary Las Vegas is an innately interesting place, and a TV-like cardboard-cutout central character whose lifestyle is of neither much interest nor much relevance to the typical reader.
Unlike Murray, Francis (a former steeplechase jockey) is more interested in the sport than the betting on it. There's nary a murder in "Decider," but there's no lack of suspense in the arson, white-collar crime and assorted other wrongdoing. To be sure, Francis writes to a formula, but it's a good formula. In "Decider" he once again draws readers into the action of English horse-racing making, and creates new characters who stick in the memory for more than a few minutes after you've finished the book.
- GEOFF SEAMANS\ Peter Crow teaches at Ferrum College.\ Mary Ann Johnson teaches at Roanoke College.\
by CNB