Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993 TAG: 9307040265
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by MARY ANN JOHNSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Wealth, greed, ambition, sex, deceit, power - Dominick Dunne knows what appeals.
To further heighten the draw, he opens his story with a scene from a murder trial. It worked in "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," and it works in "A Season in Purgatory."
The scenario is familiar; it follows formula, but parallels can be found in a nationally prominent political family as well as in fiction. A wealthy Irish Catholic family in New England tries, with little success, to buy acceptance into established society. Gerald Bradley is the domineering patriarch whose sharp business deals and shady practices have built a fortune.
His wife, Grace, ignores his philandering and concentrates on her children and the priest of the moment. The boys attend the proper prep schools, and the girls are sent to convent schools. Family failings are kept secret through complicity or financial payments.
Hope for ultimate political stature is centered in a younger son, Constant, whose looks, charisma, generosity and daring behavior win him the friendship of studious scholarship student Harrison Burns. Harrison, who in later life becomes a writer, is the novel's narrator. The story, his journal of life with Constant and within the family, flows easily in a conversational tone.
There is a dark side to Constant, of course; it leads to a series of incidents and ultimately to the death of a teen-aged girl. Subsequent events become Harrison's purgatory and shape his life until, 20 years later, he decides to escape his horrible torment. Thus the novel.
Dunne has established a formula that entertains and sells. He remains true to it, to the point of acknowledging characters from previous novels in this one. Also true to precedent, the glitter of the story obscures its inconsistencies, and the tinsel adds scintillation to an otherwise unremarkable revelation.
Beach book.
Mary Ann Johnson is an alumna of Hollins College.
by CNB