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Though Joan Samson's first novel owes its resonance to Shirley Jackson's American-gothic short story The Lottery, the book tends to provoke rather than frighten. The author's poetic imagery highlights the New England scene and characters: "Beneath the high wind, a tongue of water rang against the scoured stones like the wooden clapper in a bell, warning that they were slippery." The Auctioneer becomes less a tale of suspense than a parable of politics. The open questions it poses are as old as society itself: What is the nature of power? What makes people cede control over their own destinies to the glib, the avaricious, the contemptuous?
THE ASSASSINS by JOYCE CAROL GATES 568 pages. Vanguard Press. $8.95.
The somewhat too prodigious Joyce Carol Gates, 37, whose fiction has exploded with gunshots, stabbings and bombings, also sets off booby traps in the mind. Her seventh novel is a meditation on assassination and the violence that lodges in the American heart. This is her roughest, most repetitious read, yet it is difficult to suggest a briefer way to tell such a complex tale.
When Andrew Petrie, a former right-wing U.S. Senator, is assassinated in his sprawling New York farmhouse, the list of possible left-wing assassins is all but endless. A reactionary advocate of population control, Petrie was also the nettlesome gadfly editor of a scholarly monthly journal. At the time of his murder, he was composing a treatise on the failure of the American experiment. The reader is compelled to ask if the megalomaniacal Petrie was 1) a mere crackpot, 2) a latter-day Henry Adams or 3) a pernicious William F. Buckley minus the charm. The novel is slowly unraveled by three highly inflamed, profoundly disturbed minds. Each version of the events needs the other two to make literary and psychological sense.
Author Gates is best understood alongside the 19th century's great moral improvers. She is sister-in-arms to Melville, Hawthorne, Twain and Mrs. Stowe. All wanted their writing to better the public they were writing for—even when they despaired of civic improvement. Gates has yet to write a book that liberates as fully as it lacerates. But she cares about the national identity as no other living American novelist does. If she can steady her grip on her terrifying, transmogrifying wit, there may yet be a great novel in the already vast Gates canon.