Fiction: Blunting the World’s Sharp Edges

In a real world that is becoming increasingly strident, a reminder that the powers of imagination can heal is itself an elixir.

The world of the ‘50s is full of rough edges in a book called NIGHT RIDING by Katherine Martin (Alfred A. Knopf: $12.95; 197 pp.); if the writing were not so lyrical, the book’s themes of incest would be harsh indeed. Prin, 11, misses her father, away recovering from tuberculosis, and is fascinated by the new girl next door, Mary Faith Hammond, who is battered and pregnant by her father, B.Z. He attempts to hurt Prin one night, during one of her beloved, secret horseback rides. An unbearable feeling of loss pervades this book, of a child’s nameless ache for things to be “all right” when clearly they are not. And witness this moving betrayal of innocence: “I feel like B.Z. Hammond has set something with night feet loose in our pasture. It’s one of those thick darknesses that’s gone when you look right at it, but moves in the corner of your eye when you look somewhere else.” Martin’s resonant debut work casts light on the darkness about which she has so eloquently written.

Summer has faded, spring is long past, but there is a novella just too West Coast to leave out of this sampler. Collapse teen-age vernacular into one hip dictionary, people a glittering pink flamingo universe with a fairy godmother, sweet gay boys and a wide-eyed innocent named Weetzie Bat, map it all out among the jammed highways and cement strips of L.A.’s boulevards, and you have WEETZIE BAT by Francesca Lia Block (Harper & Row/A Charlotte Zolotow Book: $12.95; 88 pp.). All Weetzie wants is a boy she calls “My Secret Agent Lover Man”; her gay friend Dirk is looking for his Duck. In other words, they seek true love, and thanks to Weetzie, they get it. Some parents may want to shelter their younger kids from this blithe, frank tale, but the spirit is so generous and the vision so clear that any innocents in the crowd will glide through this blue-sky-sand-and-surf scene unscathed.

Books offer readers idyllic settings when their own environments are not; and humor when nothing else seems funny. Invoking characters from Czech folk tales, Vit Horejs has composed four witty stories about an irresistible friendship between two profoundly funny fellows, PIG AND BEAR, illustrated by Friso Henstra (Four Winds Press: $11.95; 40 pp.). Their quiet forest is the backdrop for a world of misunderstandings that are always amicably resolved; they squabble about squabbling, and create emergencies while trying to avoid them. Henstra’s idiosyncratic drawings of the scratchy tenderness between these two genial souls invite readers progressing just beyond picture books into a world of nonsense and fun.

And if humor is the antidote to the heavy business of real life, further relief is in sight. You want fun? Here’s fun. If God were a vaudevillian, delivering religious instruction accompanied by rim-shots, he could cull material from Marc Gellman’s DOES GOD HAVE A BIG TOE? Stories About Stories in the Bible, with paintings by Oscar de Mejo (Harper & Row: $16.95; 96 pp.). Gellman’s lively style engages even non-believers with stories about Adam and Eve, who leave the garden to water a drooping tomato plant, and Noah (“Noah, you rat, let us in! We’re your friends! “). De Mejo’s elegant paintings contain bare hints of his usual surrealistic style; intact are his quirky, intoxicated shapes that communicate both humor and warmth in deep colors and thickly applied, textured paint. This is a book adults will steal and share among themselves.