ARTS AND LIVING ARTSWEEK

FICTION/REVIEW THE AMBIDEXTRIST PETER ROCK CONTEXT BOOKS, $21.95, 224 PAGES ; AN INTERSECTION OF LOST SOULS YEARNING TO CONNECT IN PHILADELPHIA

Monica Drake - Special to The Oregonian

891 words

17 February 2002

Portland Oregonian

SUNRISE

D09

English

(Copyright (c) The Oregonian 2002)

A new, beautifully written novel by Peter Rock paints a dark, bleak picture -- though, at the same time, also mystical and magical@BYLIMONICA DRAKE - Special Writer, The Oregonian@LEADIt's exciting to pick up a book by Peter Rock, to read sentences that are natural, not at all contrived, and yet still wonderfully new and surprising.

With his first novel, "This Is the Place," Rock created an obsessive, worldly narrator -- a voice that speaks as easily of angels as of blackjack or rattlesnakes. The narrator tells his tale seductively, articulating a dark and dreamy, misguided reasoning fueled by longing and fear. In Rock's second book, "Carnival Wolves," the range of characters is endless, while the tone again stays steady, controlled and haunting. Now, with his most recent novel, "The Ambidextrist," a character from "Carnival Wolves" returns.

Scott, a drifter and small-time criminal, becomes central as he tries to make a home for himself in the forgotten corners of Philadelphia, moving between abandoned lots, deserted buildings and construction sites.

"It's a serious city," Scott says, when asked why he's come to Philadelphia. He says, "I mean . . . there are bigger ones -- but there aren't any that are more serious." This character earns a slim living as a subject for medical trials, and spends the rest of his time trying to make connections, to shake off his status as a loner. Through the reaction of others, we're reminded that he holds his face in a unprovoked smile, a trick he adopted originally as a method for handling horses, now continued in the belief that it makes him look trustworthy to humans, too.

He manages to befriend a fellow homeless man, Ray, who keeps a hidden garden of broken glass and toys. Less successfully, Scott foists his company on a woman airline security employee. In one eerie, intimate scene, he persuades her to run his body through the airport X-ray device: "The black rubber strips slip up his body, over his face; he winces, and then he's all the way inside, gone. She could call security now, make up some story they'd believe, and then they'd escort him away. She does not. Voices echo down the corridor, and she lifts her foot, stops the conveyor belt. Scott's ribs show on the screen, thin and white, bowed. . . . She steps on the switch and the bones scroll by in the screen, the skull with its round eyes and terrible smile, the teeth thick and long, stretching all the way into the gums. There is no decent explanation, she knows, for what she is doing."

Scott engages the woman's delinquent teen-age brother, too, a boy raised almost as her son and looking for trouble. It's the intersection of these relationships that fuels the book, drawing disparate characters closer. The point of view shifts from one to another with ease, allowing each character to be fully realized.

There's a beauty in the texture of the world, in even the most forlorn or mistreated of landscapes, revealed through Rock's words. As the main character walks through an abandoned waterworks complex, Rock writes, "Atop one of the small buildings, a stone woman reclines with a waterwheel; on top of another, a bearded river god is held down by chains. Scott keeps walking along the bricks, parallel to the river and above it. Past the buildings, the bricks beneath his feet turn to blacktop; here and there, thick glass squares, only four inches across, break the surface. Down on his knees, he squints through and can see nothing; he wonders if the swimming pool is under him, rats diving through the water . . . "

This sense of texture and beauty heightens in scenes that border on magical but rest in the real world. As Scott discovers his friend Ray's garden, Rock writes, "A light shines from the ground. A round pond, water reflecting, the brightness torn only by the shadows of leaves . . . flat stones have faces painted on them, eyes and mouths the color of fingernail polish. Spoons stand, their handles stuck in the dirt, and photographs of faces have been cut from magazines and affixed to their other ends; actresses and sports stars smile, their colors faded. Plastic flowers rise among the spoons, the tiny faces stuck inside the blossoms, encircled by petals. Across the pond, the limbs of dolls and mannequins jut from the dirt, as if their bodies lie below and are about to surface." In the midst of this textural world, it's a sad joke that Scott lives on the pureed mash of scavenged baby food, jars carried in his backpack, "a whole case of it, barely expired . . . "

In this book, as in his previous two, Rock shows the world so carefully rendered that it verges on magical, a realism so finely detailed, though dark, it becomes mystical and enchanted.

Peter Rock, who teaches at Reed College in Portland, will read from "The Ambidextrist" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Powell's on Hawthorne, 3723 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.

Monica Drake is a Portland writer.