Trombone - Softcover

An adolescent's philandering father is training him to be an arnist--until a woman steps between them. In his seventh novel (Tornado Alley, 1989, etc.), Nova matches his hard-boiled style with his blue-collar milieu--where small-time crooks and inscrutable Oriental kingpins do business--and enables the story barely to survive its stereotypes. It opens with California print-shop owner Dean Gollancz taking his son Ray with him to commit arson and collect payment from Mr. Mei, who reads Marcus Aurelius and leads the good life. ``I'm not a firebug,'' Dean tells his son. ``I'm an arsonist. There are good reasons for a building to disappear....'' While Ray learns the rules of the trade, Dean philanders on wife Marge, ten years his elder with a ``constant antagonism to the passage of time,'' and takes up with teenaged Iris Mason, whom Ray loves. Ray, who is smart enough for college (Dean: ``I thought you were going into the printing business. Isn't that what we'd always planned?''), takes the fall for Dean when Iris's father shows up at their house, enraged. Iris disappears (with help from Mei?); Ray leaves town, then returns to tell his father to ``stop acting like a small-time crook!'' and goes to Mei to locate Iris. In return for information, he agrees to torch a condo, and in Vegas--after digressions and filler--he finds Iris, a high-paid call girl. The two will take off--forever--after a final visit to Mr. Mei. Nova's eye for human detail and gritty texture is nearly unerring--even while elements of story and character occasionally veer too close to hackneyed genre formulations. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nova ( The Good Son ; Incandescence ) here taps the heat and energy of the bond between a son and his arsonist father . Ray Gollanz is not yet 20 when he first accompanies his father, Dean, on his outside job as an arsonist-for-hire. Intelligent and perceptive, Ray knows that his much-beloved dad father used twice already is a big talker and a ladies' man who signals the end of each affair by playing his trombone. The potentially destructive nature 'join forces' below of Ray and Dean's attachment, captured first in Ray's memory of their watching the light of atom bomb tests when he was a little boy, is stirred when Dean and Iris Mason, Ray's high-school classmate in Bakersfield, Calif., become an item. After Dean is scared off by Iris's father, Ray and Iris join forces and together begin to test the limits of their tolerance for danger and self-revelation. Iris leaves home and Ray, opposing Dean, accepts a scholarship to college in the East. He comes back to Bakersfield when Dean's life begins to fall apart and, facing the risk of exposing his feelings, attempts both to find Iris and to sort through the demands of filial loyalty. Calling to mind Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart , this ambitious novel is hampered by its schematic plot and the sometimes portentous, often strangled dialogue of characters who cannot say what they feel. Yet the gritty settings and the vivid characterizations of Ray and Dean, combined with the compelling undercurrent of tension, create a powerful effect.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.