Cultural Symbiosis

Tasty Pulp John Domini Wolf Point Edward Falco Unbridled http://www.unbridledbooks.com 240 pages; cloth, $23.95 Edward Falco has been pulling offunusual fiction structures for years, so the fact that his stories have turned up not only in a Best American print anthology (1995) but also as hypertext should not surprise (he has work available through http://www. eastgate.com). The brave new world of electronic writing also inspired another anthology piece, the comic and provocative "Sexy Chat," the greatest story ever set in an AOL chat room (in the Red Hen collection Blue Cathedral [2000]). Unconventional successes of this kind demonstrate a rare gift for framing, for finding an angle that creates tension, and the opening lines ofthis new novel bear out this gift. Thomas Aloysius Walker, known as "T," may be nearly sixty, but he still has plenty of hair and a "lean, muscular build." He pulls over to the side of Route 81 in upstate New York in his likewise studly new Land Rover when a pulp tableau coalesced: a young woman somewhere between eighteen and twenty -one in red leather pants. . .and a white silk blouse opened three buttons down, withblonde hair flying out fromherhead Detailfrom cover wild and wind blown and radiant in the horizontal light of late afternoon. . . . Behind her, completing the warning image, the only-a-fool-would-stop vignette, an older, long-haired, black-leather-jacketclad boy leaned back into the roadside foliage.... T "knew better than to stop, which was why he did." A tasty pulp tableau, indeed, and Falco understands the circuitry behind it—to choose a computer metaphor, though in this case he's working with linear narrative on printed pages. His first move promises kisses and bruises, the stuff of noir, and, besides that, this author clearly knows that most readers will look for more complex satisfactions, the sort of story publishers call a "literary thriller." This expression indeed turns up in the jacket copy for WolfPoint—but I'm not entirely convinced by what's within. Remember kids, the novel declaims, wrinkled old guys can take awful advantage of pretty young women. Not that the reading experience isn't tingly, both at the back of the neck and in the sex organs. The story has all the elements, here a chunk of cash stolen from some bad baddies, there the landingstrip shape of the femme fatale's pubic hair. Falco expertly filters the information, too, maintaining a perspective that breathes down T's neck, rendering vivid the ruin of his past couple of years. Of course it's stupid for the man to pick up the red-leather blonde, Jenny Cross, and her blackleather boyfriend, Lester Devereux. But the sad fact is, that stop isn't T's first self-destructive move on this trip. Though he's made millions in a boring industry (cleaning services), Walker is breaking the law simply by crossing the New York border. He's been barred from the state since his recent downward spiral began, out on Long Island, with a piece of kiddie pom off the Internet. Readers who know Falco will recognize his fondness for cyberspace, and in particular for its erotic potential, but in Wolf Point the more significant connection is the tragic heroine, Jenny Cross. Jenny comes close to being a great creation, a hottie with insight, and with strength enough to clamber free—almost—from crushing childhood trauma. Indeed, though the novel's stage is claustrophobic —a weekend in a rustic cabin—all three figures strut and fret with convincing autonomy; even Lester totters intriguingly between brute and clown. Yet whenever a reader steps back from the threat and worry, these three start looking like clich és: T, the weary mule stumbling back to his feet, now swatted by Lester the stick and now lured by Jenny the carrot. Jenny has points in common with Missy, the tormented teenage protagonist ofFalco's hypertext A Dream with Demons (1997), and while good writers often recycle their character types (see Nabokov, especially), the effect in WolfPoint feels schematic. In Jenny's last name, and in her initials, we see too clearly the crucified savior. Likewise simplistic...