THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609030211
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BERNICE GROHSKOPF
LENGTH: 66 lines
FALL
KAI MARISTED
Random House. 275 pp. $23.
The equestrian show circuit is a closed circle of devotees, as unique and treacherous as the race-track setting that Dick Francis employs in his mysteries. Fall, a new novel by Kai Maristed, is peopled with the ardent, competitive and occasionally obsessed people who show horses. Maristead not only captures the glamour and elegance of the horses and their young riders, whose parents must be rich to finance this expensive sport. She also takes us behind the scenes.
Erica Habbrecht is a dedicated young trainer with an innate understanding of horses, as well as of the youngsters she instructs. Though married, she's attracted to Lex Healey, a security guard for Horse Guard International. Healey is an outsider with no particular interest in horses, except that Erica rides them.
These independent spirits are drawn to each other but try to conceal their affair. It does not escape the watchful eyes of Ruthie Pryor, whose story is tightly interwoven with theirs. Ruthie is a beautiful young woman who had been a talented rider before she was severely crippled in a car accident.
Although the monetary settlement was considerable, Ruthie realizes that some of her money has been skimmed off, and she's determined to find out by whom; she's determined as well to learn the identity of the hit-and-run driver responsible for her injuries. Her parents know, but will not tell her.
In the course of her investigation, as she skillfully maneuvers a wheelchair or golf-cart for transportation, she begins to suspect what Lex and Erica have already suspected, that someone is trying to kill valuable horses.
Maristed's graphic descriptions of the ingenious techniques that might be used to kill a horse without being easily detected are excruciating to read. But her intention is to expose the unscrupulous people who inhabit this glamorous world, and she spares no details.
Fall is a carefully constructed story with some fine writing, but much of it is too tight and self-conscious. Maristead employs a cryptic, tough style; her prose is filled with the vocabulary of the horse world, tough on the uninitiated. And her trick of approaching a scene obliquely so the reader has to figure out who and where can be irritating.
Twice she makes the common mistake of using the phrase ``could care less'' to mean total indifference when ``couldn't care less'' is correct. (Where are the editors these days?)
The relationship between Lex and Erica, which seems centered on their furtive efforts to find places to make love, is not well-defined. Erica's relationship to her husband, an unemployed older man, is never clarified either.
This is a world Maristed obviously knows well, and she has chosen her title carefully. Has she intended this as a microcosm of a larger system? The academic world? The fashion world? The publishing world? The world of politics? Of entertainment? All share similar characteristics: a glamorous surface that hides a dark, unlovely underbelly.
She based Fall on the true account of Tommy Burns, who recently confessed after he was caught that his ``motive for killing horses was to make money.'' By exposing the ugly reality of horse shows, Maristed has performed a service for children victimized by self-serving parents who urge them to compete only to glorify themselves.
- MEMO: Bernice Grohskopf is a free-lance book reviewer in Charlottesville
who specializes in 19th century British literature. by CNB