DISCOVERIES

VIOLENCE, NUDITY, ADULT CONTENT

By Vince Passaro

Simon & Schuster: 298 pp., $24

Vince Passaro has been writing short fiction and essays for magazines for a long time. This comes with a stylistic price tag, and fans have wondered if he could keep it up for a longer work, say, a novel. The answer is yes. This reader was dragged kicking and screaming through “Violence, Nudity, Adult Content.” Didn’t like the title, don’t like novels about lawyers, besides which, most fiction set in upper-middle-class New York presents all of the myopia and none of the tender joys of that city. It turns out that “Violence, Nudity, Adult Content” is not only a novel about urban rage, it’s also a novel about tenderness and where to find it.

The curtain opens on two beleaguered archetypes of our time: the overworked man, William Riordan, and the overworked mommy, his wife, Ellie. Romance is a thing of the past. Everyone has forgotten why and how they got into this rat race. Passaro takes time to describe the lives of his main characters. He steps back in time to show Ellie and William meeting and having children, so that our understanding of how much their lives have changed is clear. So clear that we identify with one or the other: the working woman thrown into full-time motherhood or the overworked lawyer alienated in his own home.

Then Passaro takes us deeper into their rage and fear. The deeper he goes, the harder it becomes to identify with one or the other. Passaro sneaks up on you with art, meaning--in the finest, most useful sense of the word--confusion. There’s another character in the book, a young African American woman named Ursula, also full of rage, who has been raped by two men, one black and one white. Our regular guy, out-of-it lawyer William is given the case. He’s got one other he’s working on, defending a very rich cross-dressing jerk who has murdered his wife and driven the body (with his two young kids sitting in the car) to a local dumpster. Ursula sends William regular e-mails that tell her story and the story of the city: the oozing, coagulating sex and fury of people living in codependent density, where everyone has got to keep it together or the whole experiment falls apart.

William’s wife gets sick of his absentee fatherhood. She’s a little hormonal from bearing two children in 21/2 years, so one night she sticks a fork in his cheek. She asks him to leave. Then William experiences several moral dilemmas, all job-threatening, should he choose to do the right thing. He’s Mallomar Man: together on the outside, but mushy and sensitive on the inside. Passaro captures the tiredness of his characters beautifully and also their animal panic. The children of the cross-dresser beg William not to return them to their father, even if he wins the case, and William finds a way. As a reward for recovering his lost principles, he is allowed back into the family fold (drawing blood with a fork is one of the lesser crimes in the book).

Passaro has a hard time creating different voices for his characters. William is a self-conscious smart-aleck, and it’s OK to have one or two of those per book, but when all the characters share that Woody Allen tone, it begins to look viral. It’s a big nervous breakdown of a book, and everyone feels better at the end, except, of course, the murderer and the rapists. Which is as it should be.

*

THE DEEPER WOUND

Recovering the Soul

From Fear and Suffering

By Deepak Chopra

Harmony Books: 206 pp., $16

Put your assumptions aside for a moment and consider this man. Deepak Chopra is in the business of comforting people. Many people seek his advice. Chopra is a leader in a soul recovery movement that has many leaders and followers. He teaches that we share a common soul and that the answers we seek can be found inside of us. Nothing new here. So not new, in fact, that it can feel a little shrink-wrapped and processed when you read it. He offers tricks and pathways for breaking through the cacophony of life to get to that quiet place where all the answers supposedly are. This book, unfortunately, was written, literally, the week after Sept. 11. One wishes he had waited a little to watch how pain percolated through us, but his intention was to speak to the question all religions tackle: Why is there suffering? “The Deeper Wound” is meant to offer a 100-step way of transcending fear-turned-anxiety-turned-anger into compassion. Each step is a meditation, to be digested one per day.

It’s a different process, reading a book that is more about the message than about the writing. There’s so much less struggle than there is with fiction or literature. Chopra is one of the clearer, more practical New Agers writing today. He makes the message plain, so that more than 10 people can absorb it. He has more humility than most “I have the answer” yogis. So look at Chopra as a kind of lullaby before bedtime. For grown-ups.