(6 of 7)
Adam Dwyer, a respectable lawyer and descendant of a prominent Providence family, learns that he has leukemia and roughly half a year to live. Shortly after this bad news, Dwyer's house is burglarized. He is not especially surprised, given his courtroom exposures to petty crooks and his knowledge of what goes on in his hometown. But Adam's wife Clara and teenage son Ike have received a vivid impression of how scary the world can be. Worse is to follow, not only for the Dwyers but for everyone else who figures prominently in Geoffrey Wolff's fourth novel. Providence is a tangled tale, ensnarling a number of characters, including a cop and some robbers, who manage to complicate one another's lives in ways impossible to predict. Wolff does not always seem certain whether he is offering a straight thriller or an anatomy of the creeping dry rot of urban corruption. But the atmosphere is entertainingly breezy and sleazy, with a wisecracking, side-of-the-mouth narrator and some of the tightest, meanest dialogue this side of Elmore Leonard. A hired hitman recalls one of his jobs: "I got orders about the Moron. I wasn't even mad at him. I done it. I got orders; he got dead." At the very least, Providence will give readers a more enjoyable time than it does its characters.
TEFUGA
by Peter Dickinson
Pantheon; 256 pages; $14.95
Peter Dickinson is that rare novelist who is equally at home with the inward stare of psychological fiction and the outward thrust of political commentary. That duality is reflected in two themes that reverberate through most of his books: the impact of a family's guilty past and the doomed meeting of the industrialized and the underdeveloped worlds. Both themes merge, stunningly, in Tefuga, the story of a British journalist's trip to Africa to make a docudrama about his parents--a diplomat and his young artist wife whose well-meant meddling provoked a long-ago international incident. The journalist's unveiling of how colonist and native took advantage of peculiarities in the other's mental makeup provides the revelatory pleasures of a mystery. Dickinson also manages to evoke the evolution of feminism, the modern Islamization of animist tribes, the rise of media hegemony and the fall of the British empire. His descriptions are extraordinarily vivid, his characters plausibly selfish and self-deluding, and his climax is an obliquely told yet unforgettable moment of horror.
WHITES
by Norman Rush
Knopf; 150 pages; $14.95