THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502020306
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JOE COCCARO
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
THE PAPERBOY
PETE DEXTER
Random House. 307 pp. $23.
PRODUCING A HIT can be a mixed blessing for a writer. On the one hand, a best seller can launch a writer's confidence and bookstore sales. On the other, it creates lofty expectations, standards by which all of the writer's other literary efforts will be measured.
With his latest effort, The Paperboy, Pete Dexter falls shy of matching his 1988 National Book Award winner, Paris Trout.
The two novels largely parallel each other. Both center on murders in small Southern towns, and both are strewn with flawed individuals struggling to make sense of life and justice. In both, character development runs deeply and Dexter's writing sparkles: no word clutter, no overblown metaphors, only seamless transitions.
Where The Paperboy falls short is in plot. It's not as charged as Paris Trout, with its wife-abusing, bigoted, murdering country store keeper and the morally scrambled county prosecutor who bucks a racist judicial system to punish Trout.
That said, The Paperboy is still a strong novel in its own right.
It centers on two brothers, Ward James, a 29-year-old reporter with the Miami Times, and Jack James, 19, who serves as the book's narrator.
Jack loses his swim-team scholarship at the University of Florida after draining the school's pool as a prank. His brother eventually hires him as a driver.
Ward and a colleague, both with suspended driver's licenses, return to the James brothers' home county to investigate the apparent wrongful conviction of death-row inmate Hillary Van Wetter, a menacing character who refers condescendingly to them as ``paperboys.''
The reporters are drawn to Van Wetter by Charlotte Bless, a woman sexually fixated on condemned men. Turns out, Bless also fancies Yardley Acheman, Ward's charismatic partner.
The plot is fueled first by lust, then by hypocrisy and violence and finally by betrayal.
Woven throughout the tale is the newspaper/journalism subculture: its psychology and mythology, its goodness and evil. The James brothers' father owns and edits a small newspaper in their hometown. He wants desperately for Ward to achieve journalistic stardom, but also to come home and be his successor.
Heaped over this is ethical arm-wrestling between Ward and Yardley. Ward is a yeoman with a reverence for accuracy and detail. The reporter. Yardley is more the artist, a literary craftsman whose strengths are prose and the ``essence'' of the story. The writer. It's substance vs. style.
Dexter has no doubt encountered both types. He has been a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Florida, Pennsylvania and California. He still writes a weekly syndicated column for the Sacramento Bee.
At the Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter was a gritty, brazen columnist who once was nearly beaten to death in a barroom scuffle with angry readers. That brush with death surfaces in The Paperboy.
Dexter's detailed description of Ward's beating by two sailors in a hotel room is one of the more powerful scenes in the book. It also sets the stage for professional betrayal: While Ward is in the hospital recovering from plastic surgery, Yardley pursues the Van Wetter story alone.
As in Paris Trout and Dexter's Brotherly Love (1991), a brutal tale of cops and the mob in Philadelphia, the author layers the characters in The Paperboy with texture. Lots of sweat, blood and other bodily fluids ooze. The reporters traipse through swamps, thunderstorms and cheap hotels, providing a zesty taste of southern Florida.
While The Paperboy doesn't quite rank with Paris Trout, the novel is worthwhile. It proves Dexter is more than a one-shot hero.
- MEMO: Joe Coccaro is business editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Pete Dexter, author of the novel ``The Paperboy''
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by CNB