An Unusual Trio of First Novels
It is hard to believe that White Rabbit (Houghton Mifflin), a highly acclaimed gem of a novel, is the first by Kate jptor Phillips '88. Eighty-eight-year-old Ruth Jg of method and orderliness into which i the world insists on in trading: her gumchewing granddaughter Karen has a boyfriend who Ruth suspects is up to no good; Ruth can scarcely tolerate her second husband of 36 years; a friendly Latino cleaning woman indulges her, while Ruth indulges the woman's bratty son; a UCLA classmate provides gossip. Ms. Phillips skilfully weaves these elements in and out of the fabric of Ruth's story—frightening moment; as well as scenes of almost voyeuristic intimacy.
Another rookie novelist, Robert Eaton Kelley '61, crams enough characters and plot lines for several novels in The First Book of Timothy (University Press of New Engand). It is the Cold War. Communism has turned idealists into spies and conspirators. Timothy Brown King, a disenchanted Dartmouth senior (the book, contains several familiar references to the College) abandons his studies for a bus trip to New York, in hope of solving the mysterious disappearance of his distinguished father and obtaining a clue to his own identity. Kelley's account of the attractive, learned, but psychopathic misfits whom young King encounters is ironic and at times so proto-Joycean that the reader must turn back to see what he may have missed. Not to worry. Everything will be explained shortly.
And then there is the debut novel , A Jury of Her Peers, by Jean Hanff Korelitz '83 (Crown Publishers). Korelitz was a poet until now, but she has learned jury selection (or de-selection) inside and out. Sybylla Muldoon is a public defender whose present client is a troubled individual from the shacks under New York's 5 9 th St. Bridge, "a man who simply had walked out of his body and sub-letitto someone whose references he had not bothered to check." He has stabbed and disfigured a 12-year-old girl in view of four witnesses on a busystreet—and refuses to cop an insanity plea. Despite press-whipped public indignation at the crime, Sybylla seems to be winning the case. But from that moment on, two shocking murders, plus unmistakable signs of a lurking criminal cabal, plus the arrival on the scene of a young Brooks Brothers , type from Yale Law School all turn the narrative into a terrifying thriller. Mercifully, Korelitz spares us the usual sex scenes, so Robert Parker has little to worry about. But John Grisham, we're not so sure.
