Book Review

There are some dazzling innovators in fiction these days. The 1970s have been electrically charged with Barth's succession of fun houses, barthelme's mosaics, Marquez's dream epics, Borges' magic boxes, Gaddis' unending tape recorder, and Calvino's invisible voyages. Midst these splendors, is there room for an author who plays no tricks whatever? Andre Dubus' Separate Flights…

Out West  A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is nothing timid about Fred G. Leebron’s first novel, Out West. He takes two basically decent, highly educated, young social do-gooders and quickly steeps them into the squalid heart of two murders, and then asks us, his readers, to…

Shark Dialogues  A novel by Kiana Davenport. Atheneum, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Katherine Min. Hawaiian-born writer Kiana Davenport’s new novel, Shark Dialogues, resembles a myriad of dreams, each of them urgent and vivid, some dark with destruction and heartbreak, others bright with triumph, all shimmering with sensual beauty. Davenport manages to create a world that…

Paradise, New York  A novel by Eileen Pollack. Temple Univ. Press, $27.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Paradise, New York, Eileen Pollack, author of the acclaimed 1991 story collection The Rabbi in the Attic, deftly evokes the entertaining and complex life of a Catskills hotel, as seen through the eyes of…

Sister to Sister: Women Write About the Unbreakable Bond. An anthology edited by Patricia Foster. Anchor Books/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. For the anthology Sister to Sister, Patricia Foster has gathered twenty compelling pieces on an essential subject: the relationships of sisters. Foster writes in her introduction that she opened her eyes one…

Perfect Hell  Poems by H. L. Hix. Gibbs Smith, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Dana Gioia. H. L. Hix’s Perfect Hell is the most original, accomplished, and intriguing debut volume I have seen in several years. I am so impressed by this dark and disturbing book by a little known poet that I could easily offer…

Six Figures  A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Knopf, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Stewart O’Nan. Fred G. Leebron’s provocative second novel takes on the frustrations of the young American middle class, born to privilege and fearful they may fail in their expected pursuit of success. By painstakingly dissecting the thwarted aspirations of its main character,…

In Personal Effects and Letter from an Outlying Province, two books published by the consciously feminist Alice James press, there seems to be a serious failure to "speak the loving word." The vision of Patricia Cumming's Letter. . . is one of anger, the voice dissonant and jagged. Where Sarah Appleton would say "here the…

Sky Open Again  Poems by Gian Lombardo. Dolphin-Moon, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Priscilla Sneff. The prose poem, constructed of sentences rather than lines, is a more liquid sort of solid than other poems. More like glass — that is, molten, mobile, globby — than crystal, the prose poem makes do without enjambment, relying instead on…