American Book Review / John Domini

Edward Falco has been pulling off unusual 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 of this 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, with blonde hair flying out from her head 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 Wolf Point- but I'm not entirely convinced by what's within.  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 climate 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 clichés: 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 of Falco's hypertext A Dream with Demons (1997), and while good writers often recycle their character types (see Nabokov especially), the effect in Wolf Point feels schematic In Jenny's last name, and in her initials, we see too clearly the crucified savior. Likewise simplistic is the notion that she "crosses the line" while T only touches it (and comes away, completing the pulp worn formula, a new man). Some of this heavyhandedness shows up at the level of style, too In the lines quoted above, for instance, why both "young" and "between eighteen and twenty-one." Why the pop poetry about her hair? Falco doesn' always resist hand-me-down language, either, as when Jenny, getting a massage, is described as  a “cat being petted." -

I must add that what Wolf Point offers by way of sex––I'm deliberately fudging the point––prove intense and moving. Again, drama flares within an ever-shrinking space, as great film noir turned limited budget to an advantage.

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 self­destructive 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 porn 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.

If a literary work is defined by the open endedness, the inexhaustibility that everyone fron John Barth to Umberto Eco has celebrated, then this thriller isn't quite there. It's too pat. But for zero-sum game, it's a dinger.