Finding Love On Death Row   

Love & Obits
By John Ed Bradley
Henry Holt

Love & Obits
By John Ed Bradley
Henry Holt
276 pages; $21.95

A recent biography of Christopher Columbus was said by one reviewer to be so thorough that the future explorer wasn't even born until Page 85.

Ah, fiction. On Page 1 of the novel "Love & Obits," the Washington Herald's Joseph Burke is assigned the official send-off of poor Louie Vannoy, a restaurateur gone to his eternal reward. Three pages later Vannoy's not-so-grieving widow, Laura, appears in person at the paper to provide color for the piece. A scant page from there the two are seated in a hotel bar where Burke has led her to conduct his research and by Page 8, before we have even gotten comfortable in our chairs, Vannoy has patted Burke's cowlick down, raised goose bumps on his flesh and left a tingle in his skull.

"His groin," we are informed, "stirred as well." And the battle is joined.

After his first novel, "Tupelo Nights," former Washington Post reporter John Ed Bradley was hailed as a new Southern voice. In "Love & Obits," Bradley goes from the land of Elvis and Spanish moss back inside the Washington Beltway — and often below the belt, as Burke's introduction to the widow Laura suggests.

Burke is the newsroom's fallen star. Once a rising prospect on the Herald's magazine, Burke was banished to the paper's obituary desk — death row, to those on it and off — a rung so low on journalism's ladder even story clippers in the library look down on him with impunity. His demotion was not without cause. Burke had been caught doing to a prominent senator's wife what senators are often accused of doing to the American public. When a local gossip columnist told the world about it, Herald Editor Cameron Yates, a friend of the senator, sentenced Burke to the obit pages.

Yes, still more stirring, tingling and goose bumps. But the Herald is not just one big happy singles bar. Burke's fellow grim reaper of death notices, Alfred Giddings III, has won a Pulitzer Prize but never once the heart of a woman. Burke himself is recently and unhappily divorced. His father, and roommate, has feigned paralysis and confined himself unnecessarily to a wheelchair after losing his wife in an automobile accident. His friend the photographer dreads the results of his test for AIDS, which is so everpresent a threat that however desperate and lonely the women Burke encounters at bar time, they still demand evidence of his own AIDS-freedom before touching.

Laura Vannoy, of course, recovered from the death of a husband she didn't much care about anyway, becomes the vehicle that lifts Burke from the pit he has dug for himself. Before redemption, though, he gains inventive revenge on the gossip columnist who put him on death row and has it out with the evil editor Yates in an episode any self-respecting reporter would relish.

Unfortunately, Bradley doesn't always blend this darkness and light, this humor and sadness, into a seamless whole. Burke's dour spirit so sets the tone for events that follow that the ending seems too facile. But his characters are catchy — no matter how much you envy Pulitzer winners, you can't help but cheer for Giddings to finally find love, or at least a date, and from all of this darkness and despair Bradley does fashion a novel for these uncertain '90s.

Author Benjamin Cheever, meanwhile, son of famous writer John Cheever, chose to write his first novel about one Arthur Prentice, son of famous writer Icarus Prentice. Not unexpectedly, "The Plagiarist" is an examination of the confusion and struggle for identity a son who would be a writer finds in the shadow of a giant father.

"So you're the famous Arthur South Prentice," colleague Gilbert Collingwood says on meeting our troubled hero.

"Famous?" asks Arthur.

"You have a famous father," says Gilbert.

"Not the same thing," says Arthur.

Even Icarus understands. "I just wanted you to know," he tells his son, "that I'm aware of the fact that it's a pain in the ass to be the son of Icarus South Prentice."

If Cheever's novel is as autobiographical as all this suggests, it must indeed be a pain. In fiction, at least, it has left the son a pathetic life in which to find his way. Arthur Prentice works for the "American Reader," a not even thinly veiled Reader's Digest, where he fills pages with the writings of others. He lives in a house purchased by his in-laws, has a wife who hates men and won't sleep with him and a child he seldom sees who even in kindergarten appears to be inheriting Arthur's interest in violent fantasies.

He is, in short, something of a wimp, which gives the reader little reason to wish him better. Eventually Arthur begins to deal with his life, his wife and his heritage but through such an indirect drift of a struggle that you don't so much cheer his discovery as wish his own son a better lot.