Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994                   TAG: 9404110136
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by M. KATHERINE GRIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A WELL-TOLD TALE OF- GOOD, EVIL AND MURDER SAVANNAH-STYLE

``Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'' is the story of a murder - or manslaughter, or self-defense. Or maybe it is a story of Savannah, as the subtitle suggests.

Whatever it is, it is a good read, whether the reader is a true-crime fan, a Southern culture aficionado or just a person who appreciates in-depth gossip.

John Berendt, a New Yorker, former editor of New York Magazine and columnist for Esquire, spent several years, off and on, in Savannah. There he mingled with and wrote about the upper crust and their emulators. He also spent time with, among others, an itinerant pianist, a vulgar transsexual, a voodoo practitioner and a man who walks an imaginary dog.

Like a Shakespearean play, the book uses this eclectic cast of characters to show the reader the comedy and the tragedy of life; unfortunately, the two are sometimes inseparable. Also like Shakespeare, Berendt builds to the climax, the killing, in the center of the work. The remainder of this nonfiction novel is the courts' attempts to determine the nature of the killing.

But unlike Shakespeare, Berendt has written neither tragedy nor comedy. Although many critics point to the humor in the book, even the funny characters seem too lost and pathetic to sustain laughter. And the characters who might be the heroes of tragedy live such sad lives that their falls are more pitiable than tragic.

Also unlike Shakespeare, Berendt is highly readable. The author is an unobtrusive character in his book, which he writes with a clear but not simplistic style. The work moves fast and is certainly worth a weekend's read. But it isn't forgotten quite so quickly.

Occasionally, Berendt himself seems gullible, passing along urban legends, such as a dead cat story, as though they were gospel. He seems unduly fascinated by the transsexual's costumes and lewd flirtations. But he is also sensitive to the hidden pain of the man accused of murder, a man who moves from a mansion to a jail without skipping a beat, at least superficially.

Berendt does his job as a journalist: he finds the why behind the who and the what. The problem is that with real life we often don't know the reason behind every behavior. So we try to be the psychologist or sociologist that the journalist invites us to be. However, we know that even visiting beautiful and isolated Savannah would leave us more than ever in the dark about the mysteries behind the city's facades.

The title of Berendt's book is perfect, except that the good always seems much more temporary and elusive than the evil, and one wonders whether midnight is perpetual.

M. Katherine Grimes teaches English at Ferrum College. She recently completed a dissertation about Southern literature.