FICTION

ST. FAMOUS: A Novel by Jonathan Dee (Doubleday: $22.95; 336 pp.). What if Reginald Denny, of Rodney King riot fame, had been a novelist? That’s the deceptively simple, seemingly trivial question posed by Jonathan Dee, author of the well-received “The Liberty Campaign,” in this first-rate book: What if the severely injured victim of a random, racist, perhaps politically motivated crime, had the psychological, empathetic resources with which to put the experience in context? Dee’s answer is both revealing and frightening, for the bottom line in “St. Famous” is that celebrity culture trumps all, insisting on the abolition of nuance and ambiguity. Paul Soloway, recovering from his abduction and beating during a Manhattan race riot precipitated by a white man’s nonsensical acquittal in the killing of a black teenager, has no intention of writing about his ordeal: He wants only to finish his novel, 10 years in the making and far from complete. Soloway is now famous but turns down pots of money (to his literary agent’s chagrin) for his first-person story. He has made the right choice but of course is forced to unmake it, because of financial needs, familial pressure, internal doubt. I won’t give away the book’s appallingly appropriate, almost surreal conclusion, but Soloway’s wife captures the family’s experience pretty well while ruminating upon a cheesy documentary on Charles and Di. “The restless material of art and of life itself moving impatiently toward its kitsch existence, the final and lasting stage,” she thinks, “the appetite for the TV movie was an appetite for disposing of experience, a way of laying something genuinely troubling to rest.”