PEARL K. BRL
Fiction Chronicle
THE ROBBER BRIDE. By Margaret Atwood.
Nan Talese/Doubleday.
$23.50.
A BIG STORM KNOCKED IT OVER. By Laurie Colwin.
HarperCollins.
$22.00.
BODY AND SOUL. By Frank Conroy.
Houghton Mifflin/Seymour
Lawrence. $24.95.
SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW. By Peter Hoeg.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$21.00.
WHILE ENGLAND SLEEPS. By David Leavitt.
Viking. $22.00.
TIME REMAINING. By James McCourt.
Alfred
A.
Knopf $21.00.
LITTLE KINGDOMS. By Steven Millhauser.
Poseidon Press. $21.00.
NO OTHER LIFE. By Brian Moore.
Nan Talese/Doubleday. $21.00.
THE HOLDER OF THE WORLD. By Bharati Mukherjee.
Alfred A.
Knopf $22.00.
A SUITABLE BOY. By Vikram Seth.
HarperCollins. $30.00.
Novels written on the cusp of journalistic history often leave one with
little further to say. The story is so closely tied to current events that it is
immediately exhausted in its topical relevance by reviewers; everything
that can be said about the novel is somehow contained within those
events. This is the fate even of a novel as passionately felt and beautifully
written as Brian Moore's
No Other Life,
which deals quite transparently
with the figure ofJean-Bertrand Aristide, the quixotic revolutionary priest
who became the first legally elected president of Haiti and was forced into
exile by the military dictators who now rule the country with a viciously
iron fist. Moore's depiction of the character based on Father Aristide and
the agonies of that ragged Caribbean island are such palimpsests of the
events that no depth remains to be explored. The reader of
No Other Life
becomes so trapped in the airless space between the surface of the daily
newspapers and the narrative Moore has drawn from those pages that the
novel- and the reading- remain desperately unresolved. A pity.
This leaves nine other novels from the season's crop to deal with, and
they are, as always, a decidedly mixed bag. There does emerge one in–
triguing curiosity. Three of these novels- Bharati Mukherjee's
The Holder
