THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 5, 1997 TAG: 9701060176
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON
LENGTH: 60 lines
TEN INDIANS
MADISON SMARTT BELL
Pantheon. 264pp. $23.
In a storefront in the Baltimore ghetto, the inner discipline of the martial arts, taught by a white man, seems to bring a structure, a center to the lives of the young black men who are drawn by their curiosity from the nearby projects and gangs.
But as the students fall in the streets like the Indians of the nursery rhyme, it becomes clear that for both master and pupils it will not be possible to separate the clean way of self-defense from the bloody warfare of the real inner-city world.
When the teacher reaches instinctively to protect a baby from a drive-by shooting, he involves himself in a spiral of violence that seems only to pick up force the more its victims try to stop it.
There are plenty of writers today who are masters of the novel. But there are not that many whose work matters, gets to the heart of our times and deals with the problems that we share as individuals and as a society.
Madison Smartt Bell can write, and he matters. Ten Indians and his previous novel, the National Book Award-nominated 1995 epic of Haitian revolution, All Souls' Rising, form a powerful statement, especially on the gulf between races.
Bell's work is full of pain and truth. The forces pulling his characters apart, from themselves and each other, are too strong for any healing values of order, family or love to bind. His is a frightening world, as those destructive forces and conditions are mostly of our own making.
Mike Devlin is a child psychiatrist. His tending of troubled youths has earned him a comfortable suburban life with his wife and teen-age daughter Michelle, a black-belt Tae Kwon Do master like her father. Devlin's master pushes him to open a branch of the martial-arts gym in downtown Baltimore, and students come, in two neat groups, from warring neighborhoods.
The dominant student and man is Trig, who arrives in a purring Lexus, a figure of control, intelligence, perhaps menace. Devlin works to instill his discipline and purge his place of violence. He succeeds there, but empty spaces grow in his ranks as the fighting and killing rage on the outside.
Confronting Trig, Devlin says: ``They say you kill people.''
``Yo,'' Trig said softly. ``I might if they were trying to kill me.''
Devlin is left with a choice: to retreat into his own space, his affluent conventional life, his wife and work, or to plunge fully into the lives and fates of his students.
How should I spend my life? he thinks. Dribble it out in a dole of days? Or spend it right up? That decision, and its consequences, are played out to the novel's end.
Well told both in the third person and from a handful of viewpoints - Devlin's, Trig's and others of the ghetto - Ten Indians is a success of form as well as of content. Bell writes surely of the martial arts, dedicating the book in part to four of his own masters.
It's an important book. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor.