BROTHERLY LOVE
by Pete Dexter
Random House; 274 pages; $22
Pete Dexter's eerie knack for placing himself inside the skin of even the minor players in his novels may be something like perfect pitch for a musician. It is a useful trick, done with no apparent effort -- in Dexter's case with no literary showiness whatsoever -- but by itself it does not make an artist. What deepens and darkens his writing, so that art is the precise word to describe it, is a powerful understanding that character rules, that we live with our weaknesses and die of our strengths.
This...
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