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But Bosse's best characters are fictive. Philip Embree, a missionary fresh out of Yale Divinity School, tries to escape his past by joining up with a gang of bandits. Vera Rogacheva, a beautiful White Russian, attempts to escape her future by surviving with the help of sex and guile. Tang, a Chinese general, still observes the ancient code of honor in a world where that concept has little place. As richly textured as a tapestry, The Warlord captures both the essence of Asia and the sweeping panorama of a people trapped between the ancient grinding forces of hollow tradition and heartless change.
THE TENNIS HANDSOME by Barry Hannah Knopf; 166 pages; $11.95
Readers who follow the work of Author Barry Hannah may feel a touch of déjà vu upon beginning his fifth book. The Tennis Handsome opens with two pieces from Airships (1978), Hannah's highly praised collection of short stories. The first, Return to Return, retells the gothic catastrophe of French Edward, a good-looking tennis pro who discovers his mother in bed with his supposedly homosexual coach, nearly drowns in the Mississippi River and is fished out with most of his mental capacities washed away. He lives on as an automaton who is still a terror on the courts. The second reprised story, Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet, deals chiefly with Captain Bob Smith of the U.S. Army and the crisis he undergoes during the war in Viet Nam.
The heroes of these tales have one thing in common: both come from Vicksburg, Miss. So does Hubert ("Baby") Levaster, a doctor hooked on booze, drugs and depravity, who packs a .410 shotgun pistol (its shells stuffed with popcorn) and steers the brain-damaged French Edward around the pro tennis tour. "Levaster banged him a hard blow against the heart. He saw French come alive and turn a happy regard to the court." What happens when these three characters mix, along with their assorted relatives, friends and lovers, is deliberately unbelievable; in extending two stories into a sketchy novel, Hannah creates a sequel as sideshow. The true star is Hannah's protean comic prose. He can deadpan with the best of them. Says Bob Smith, explaining why he has stolen a dead friend's extensive collection of books: "I never had an education except school." Even closer to Hannah's talent is rhetorical display. A description of Levaster: "He was wretched-looking; around him was a sodden shirt printed with unlikely blazing flora. It made you think of the flag of a tropical nation that had long since collapsed from bad taste."
To charge $ 11.95 for a little more than 100 pages of new material seems, on the face of it, outrageous. Yet Hannah's weird, obsessed intensity justifies the extravagance.
FATAL OBSESSION by Stephen Greenleaf Dial; 250 pages; $14.95
A popular T shirt among the town's teen-agers proclaims: HAPPINESS is CHALDEA IN YOUR REAR-VIEW MIRROR. Even 30 years ago, youngsters did their best to escape the Midwestern farming community as soon as they graduated from high school. John Marshall Tanner, fiftyish, was no exception. Returning now for the first time, the former football hero finds the town of Chaldea little changed: as ever, skulduggery, greed and hypocrisy thrive.