LONESOME STANDARD TIME

A backwoods village becomes hell on earth in Jennings's (Mosquito Games, 1989, Women of Granite, 1992) newest heavy-handed saga of bleak prospects and endlessly battered souls in up-country New Hampshire. Along the Whispering Turnpike, a dead-end road whose culminating mountain of gravel is a favorite of suicide drivers, Hank Rodgers makes his way home. After 15 years away from Hunt's Station, he finds that it and its inhabitants have taken a turn for the worse. The ubiquitous toxic dumps of Hunt Waste Management have fouled earth, air, and heart, leaving all in their vicinity (except the ravens and crows, which thrive) at death's door. Hank's return lightens the gloom: He fans the desire of 17-year-old Maggie Parriss, the last child born in town, to leave and not look back; he rekindles the passion of his ex-lover Clare Hunt, daughter of the evil dump-owner turned invalid and recluse; he plays the prodigal son to his bitter, wasted, banjo-wizard father, who for years has mesmerized Hunt's Station with his woeful, wailing country music but has recently used his banjo to bash in the skull of a reporter snooping around the town's subterranean fires and open pits. Hank brings matters to a head, though, when he takes Dad's old souped-up Pontiac down the Turnpike to challenge his own demons and in the process runs over Dirty Willy, the company foreman/hitman, who crawls back to his boss's biggest pit, sets himself ablaze, and jumps in, knowing that the ensuing conflagration will consume everything. Hank joins the survivors, but his father pays the price for his crime, joining old man Hunt in waiting for the flames to release them. Making a virtue of the absence of subtlety seems to be Jennings's m.o., but this willfully overwritten story, like his others, is in this case both overwrought and ludicrous: a cartoon- novel in which the effects are as striking as they are strikingly superficial. (Author tour)