October 30-November 5, 2003

artpicks

Pete Dexter

by A.D. Amorosi

books

There is no such thing as a bad Pete Dexter book. Or even a small Pete Dexter book. The widely heralded Dexter -- he of local journalism fame -- touched on murder, class struggles and hidden racial hatred in Paris Trout; the code-driven insularity of differing Philadelphia neighborhoods in God's Pocket and Brotherly Love; the hell-bent-for-blood Wild West in Deadwood. All of these deal with the notion -- Dexter's favorite -- that life's littlest moments are simply rife with struggle and pain. Heartache, damnation and a rotten eternity are but a skip and a beat apart. Dexter is, then, the Jim Morrison of the modern novel (sans the tight leather pants) -- a man whose every word screams no one here gets out alive. You wouldn't think that true of Train (Doubleday), a soft trip with Lionel Walk, the black golf-caddy protagonist in 1950s' Los Angeles, through racial inequity on all sides of the 18 holes. Soft, that is, until Walk finds himself unwillingly and unstoppably in a maelstrom of irony -- put upon, mistaken and abused like Brecht's Good Soldier, only to be lifted and adored for the same talents that leveled him in the first place. And then Dexter employs his journalistic, pessimistic prose for an ending you could see coming down the fairway. And it never lets up. Train may not be Pete Dexter's best book. But it's Pete Dexter. Read the first sentence again.

Pete Dexter, Tue., Nov. 4, 7 p.m. free, Blauvelt Theater, Friends Select School, 17th and the Parkway, 215-563-4184.

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