Hurdles in the path

Most competitive athletes would prefer not to enter the arena as a reigning star. Compared with the defending champion, an unknown player or even an underdog enjoys a psychological advantage that favors the most brilliant, risky moves. In addition, the judges sometimes tend to apply a more forgiving standard to promising unknowns. This is one of the ways the writing game resembles more muscle-driven public performances. And again like athletes, writers cannot choose their ranking. Take Ann Patchett, a lavishly gifted writer apparently hitting full stride. After three novels and a personal reminiscence embraced by critics and readers, Patchett in 2003 burst out of the pack with “Bel Canto,” an audaciously plotted tale about a kidnapped opera singer and a Japanese diplomat, about art, terrorism and love in a South American despot-cracy. “Bel Canto” displayed the equivalent of 2 1/2 octaves’ worth of resonantly pitched, multicultural empathy. With its rise to international bestseller, and recent election to soon-to-be-released movie, “Bel Canto” has propelled its author into the not entirely enviable status of a literary star.

Now comes Patchett’s newest novel, called, simply, “Run.” The title isn’t merely allegorical. At the center of this tale, whose tightly packed plot unfolds within a 24-hour frame rife with incident and coincidence, is a born athlete. Eleven-year-old Kenya, a real charmer of a literary creation, has been growing up in fatherless poverty on the crummy side of Boston with her innocence preserved -- at least until the novel’s shattering commencement -- by her devoted mother, Tennessee. Kenya may be quiet and dutiful when at rest, but she is a stupendous runner whose joy of speed causes the prose to soar: “All the others runners on the track had stopped now, the way dancers will stop. . . . Anger and sadness and a sense of injustice . . . that fire kept her heart vibrant and hot and alive, a beautiful infallible machine. They were no longer waiting to see how fast she could go. . . . Now they wanted to see how long it would be before she crashed, and if that was what they were waiting for they might as well sit down and get comfortable.”

On a snowy post-Christmas evening, as she and her politically aware mother are exiting a Jesse Jackson lecture at Harvard, Kenya -- along with all the characters in “Run” -- finds her world spun upside down. Suddenly Tennessee catapults herself into the path of an oncoming SUV to knock out of harm’s way an African American student in heated argument with a white man. In the ensuing chaos, the student, Tip Doyle, gets off with a broken ankle, while Tennessee, who has multiple injuries, is ambulanced to the nearest hospital.

The white man, who is actually Tip’s adoptive father, Bernard Doyle (a former mayor of Boston), and Tip’s younger brother, Teddy (also adopted), see no recourse other than to take Kenya home with them for the night. There they encounter the oldest brother, Sullivan, Doyle’s black-sheep biological offspring who has unexpectedly returned from Africa this very night, on the lam from dodgy doings. All the men’s eyes come to rest on Kenya who, despite her trepidation, is excited to be inside this grand bourgeois house. The scene is set for her to spill the secret of the shadow life she has led with her mother, a secret she had sworn never to tell.

An alternative title for this novel might have been “Many Mothers.” While “Run” laps abstract post-Catholicism, racial identity (Tip and Teddy have been raised as Oreos ne plus ultra) and the value of political rhetoric, it is fired by a vision of the many mothers in a child’s life, of the irrelevance or value of the birth mother, of the endless yearning for mothers lost. In pursuit of these themes, “Run” sometimes leaves the reader behind, in disbelief.

To work the edge of unlikely incident and coincidence without tumbling into the abyss of implausibility can be one of fiction’s finest achievements. Shakespeare knew a thing or two about it, and the plots of Patchett’s previous books display close study of the Master of Chance. But perhaps talking ghosts and elaborately hidden identities don’t translate well to a modern setting. How to distract a reader’s eye from the ropes and pulleys of authorial plot-rigging is a related problem. (Shakespeare didn’t always bother, but hey, he was Shakespeare.) In “Run,” the MacGuffin of an inherited statue of the Virgin falls short of the task.

Thoroughly convincing characters and assiduous verisimilitude can help smooth both issues. In “Run,” the various mothers, sons and fathers inhabit a world in which individuals are defined by a single goal. Their world is free of physical desire, let alone sex: The all-important children seem to have been begotten by events so rare as to be on par with parthenogenesis. Their particular sensibility is to physical pain, to guilt and to tenderness -- and given the ironic imperative in so much current fiction, a writer who loves her characters as Patchett does is a blessing on us.

But writers can love too much: Even the irresistibly wisecracking Sullivan, the diluter of AIDS meds, is offered an ingenious excuse. There are no real bad guys in “Run,” only our contemporary deus ex machina: cars. The bar’s set high. Fans can expect plenty of page-turning pleasure from this intricate, humane novel, whether or not “Run” is a personal best. *