DATE: Wednesday, November 12, 1997          TAG: 9711110069

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. McAVOY 

                                            LENGTH:   69 lines

SOMETHING SLIPSHOD THIS WAY COMES

FOR ALMOST half a century, Ray Bradbury has been an icon in American literature. Best known for his short-story collections ``The Martian Chronicles'' and ``The Illustrated Man,'' he is also the author of several novels, including ``Fahrenheit 451'' and ``Something Wicked This Way Comes.'' In addition to fiction, Bradbury has written screenplays, teleplays and verse. In most of his works, he has combined incisive social criticism with the fantastic, and he has earned his reputation as a preeminent storyteller.

In the shadow of this reputation, however, Bradbury's newest collection, ``Driving Blind,'' proves disappointing. Its 21 stories, with rare exceptions, lack internal logic, employ slipshod language, and rely upon flat characters and transparent themes for an overwrought and unsatisfying glimpse of life through the erstwhile master's eyes.

``Driving Blind'' is not about language. The writing is uninspired, and, in several stories, borders on formulaic. In places, it is unabashedly sloppy and littered with descriptions that simply do not work. Unnecessary lapses into direct address - presumably intended to invite the reader in - and other shifts in point of view are disconcerting and alienating.

Nor is the collection about character. In most cases, Bradbury's characters are merely symbols, neither changing nor growing. There is little mystery among or between them, and they are far too willing to articulate their deepest thoughts. Bradbury's frequent explanations of the abstractions they represent are often irritating.

Admittedly, Bradbury is unconcerned with realism, and he should not be constrained by its conventions. Yet, even as allegory, ``Driving Blind'' suffers from its lack of logic and focus. In the end, it becomes simply the meandering of a writer in his late 70s looking back on life and desperately searching for meaning. What Bradbury finds is a life from ``another time, another age'' when ``the rules were observed.'' The realization is insufficient to sustain his book, and like many of the stories themselves, is irrelevant, an observation unsupported by style or content.

Some of these tales do offer a reminder of Bradbury's glory days. ``A Woman is a Fast-Moving Picnic'' is easily the best among them. About a group of men in Ireland who seek a secure location for their sexual indiscretions, it finds in religion an uproarious explanation for the objectification of women.

In the title story, a salesman who wears a hood to hide unknown and unexplained scars ventures into a small town to find friendship and love. He discovers that his mask hides not the horror of his face but his horror at being different. While just another take on ``beauty is only skin deep,'' the story offers a scathing examination of the ineffectiveness of and our overwhelming need for masks as protection against an all-too-cruel world.

Bradbury places much of the credit or blame for his writing on his Muse. ``When the Muse speaks,'' he writes in the Afterword to ``Driving Blind,'' ``I shut my eyes and listen. In Paris once, I touch-typed in a dark room, no lights, and wrote 150 pages of a novel in 17 nights without seeing what I put down. If that isn't Driving Blind, what is?''

He could have easily said the same about this collection. With few exceptions, the stories seem to be first drafts, ready for a lively workshop or a remorseless editor. Unfortunately, they appear to have received neither. As Truman Capote once remarked, and as this collection proves: ``That's not writing; that's just typing.'' The result is anything but vintage Bradbury, anything but art. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a fiction writer who lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Driving Blind''

Author: Ray Bradbury

Publisher: Avon. 259 pp.

Price: $23

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