Train

National Book Award Winner Pete Dexter has written a golf novel as violent as a car chase--as sad and syncopated as the blues. It's 1953, and Dion Graham lets his words drip with the Jim Crow despair of the times. The idiom is black. The caddy master is called Sweet, but he's not. The greens superintendent is called History as in "He's history." Miller Packard--white policeman, avid golfer--gets interested in the golf skills of a black caddy named Lionel Walk, Jr. (a.k.a.Train). Train plays white men on white courses and wins. Packard takes him under his wing, intrigued with the possibility of breaking the game's color line. But Train has a murder in his past. "The thing to remember about money," Packard tells his protégé, "is when you get enough of it together in one place, it smells bad." B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 14, 2003
National Book Award winner Dexter's new book is about pain: the men and women who deliver the emotional and physical blows and the limits of those who bend and break beneath them. This is a theme that runs like a dark thread through Dexter's work, from his prize-winning Paris Trout
to The Paperboy. In his latest, no one escapes unscathed, and that includes the reader. It's 1953, and Lionel Walk, a black 18-year-old caddy known as Train, works at an exclusive Los Angeles golf course. The members there are cruel and bigoted, the other caddies violent and criminal. Train is badly treated by everyone except enigmatic golfer Miller Packard, who plays a decent game and recognizes that Train has a special talent for the sport. Packard is a police sergeant who comes to the rescue of beautiful Norah Rose when she is viciously attacked and her husband is slaughtered in an attempted boat hijacking. Packard and Norah fall in love, and he moves into her Beverly Hills home. Meanwhile, Train loses his job and eventually finds work as a groundskeeper at the rundown Paradise Developments golf course. He gets the course back into shape, but this hopeful interlude cannot last. A botched tree-removal project ends in tragic farce, and Train is set adrift again. Packard—a rescuer once more—finds Train, turns him into a golf shark and wins thousands on the boy's exceptional talent. In clear, pitch-perfect prose, Dexter moves the relentless story forward, exposing the ironies and dark undercurrents of charitable actions. The calamitous conclusion looms over the novel from the start, and it comes just as the reader knows it must. (Sept. 30)Forecast:Dexter's novels always garner critical praise, and this one will be no exception, though a few reviewers may ask whether the unremitting bleakness of his plots has become formulaic.