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Thursday, October 23, 2003 Books: Nine iron will
By John Ziebell
"The world is a hungry place," a punch-drunk boxer known as Plural maintains in Pete Dexter's sixth novel, Train, and while that statement should not come as a surprise to anyone, it's more than a glib parenthetical. The author has focused his latest work not only on what those appetites are but what price the society we share pays to sate them. Anyone familiar with Dexter's best-known works--Deadwood, Brotherly Love and the National Book Award winner Paris Trout--knows him as a master of tragic human intersections. The stage is set for that in Train as well, with two comparatively blameless lives drawn to the black-hole vortex of a third in a manner that simply can't end well for everyone concerned. Train is set in the Southern California of the early 1950s, when the American dream was still rock solid, though perhaps blurred by easy money and too much light. Lionel "Train" Walk, a black caddy at a private white country club, is gifted with a better golf game than anyone he totes for. Train is, in turn, unusually insightful and maddeningly na•ve; it's this contradictory part of his nature that leaves him subject to countless small injustices that he can recognize but not avoid, the kind that occur with deadening regularity in a culture liberal enough to couch its racism in class distinctions. It might be the contradictions in Train that catch the attention of Miller Packard. Packard is an Orange County detective with the self-discipline of a slot junkie, and what he craves is risk itself. Packard revels in anything unsettled; he's only himself when he can cross the uneasy borders of social convention. And while he may indeed recognize the unique nature of Train's innate abilities, transgression is certainly part of the reason he backs a self-taught black golfer in high-dollar private contests among the wealthy dilettantes of the country club set. There's a different bond between Packard and Norah, the brutalized survivor of a bungled yacht piracy that left her husband and another man dead--along with the perps, who crossed a line that appeared only on Packard's personal map of the world. Perhaps her interest in Packard grows because she can't get back in step with her previous existence, but grow it does, and soon enough he's sharing her home in Beverly Hills. He backs Norah in much the way he backs Train, offering the kind of bumbling good deeds that the truly self-interested are capable of; sex is good, but sex on the pool deck in view of the neighborhood prudes is much more rewarding. Dexter writes the kind of stories we get swept up in, so it's possible to underrate his stylistic grace--well, maybe not. Structural and figurative parallels are layered with architectural elegance throughout the book. What Dexter does best is character; each of the three perspectives has its own voice, its own language and dialect. And though we don't always see these people clearly, it's not because they're ambiguous in terms of construction, but that we're less than comfortable shopping for analogs in the darker corners of our psyches. We also fear that, like the heroes of Greek tragedy, they are unable or simply unwilling to circumvent the single essential trait that will doom them; perhaps that's why we trust the brittle precision of their insights and the honesty of their judgments. And perhaps why, when the big hammer of coincidence drives these three disparate paths into conjunction, we think it's a really good thing. Pete Dexter Doubleday 280 pages |
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