DISPATCHES FROM THE COLD

More blue-collar realism from the author of The Fruit ‘N Food (1997, not reviewed). Farrel Gorden is a first-class loser in his early 20s: He has a sales job in a New Hampshire shopping mall and spends his nights and weekends watching TV and arguing with his girlfriend, 17-year-old Shari. Farrel knows his life is empty and tries to fill it with alcohol and sex, but he’s trouble waiting to happen. A fuse inside him ignites when his sporting goods store, which has been losing money, gets a new manager, a balding Korean-American named Roger Shin. Roger’s improvements start resentments burning in (feral) Farrel, but Shin has a beautiful wife, Helen, who in her way is as discontented as Farrel. The two begin a torrid affair, which Helen almost immediately tries to withdraw from and which drives drug- and alcohol-addicted Shari to suicide. When Farrel in turn becomes vengeful and begins stalking Helen, she breaks down and confesses the affair to Roger, who then fires Farrel—who, after brooding in his apartment for a week, marches to the sporting goods store to murder Roger. Chang narrates his passionate, downbeat tale with naturalistic distance and an authentic, even microscopic grasp of the boring, dead-end world Farrel inhabits. But Chang strives also for a Kafkaesque twist, using a nameless, down-on-his-luck biology teacher to narrate the story. This narrator lives in the apartment where Farrel’s sister used to live. The sister died of a drug overdose long before, but the narrator receives Farrel’s letters to her and, lonely as he is, reads them and reconstructs the whole story. When he senses that Farrel is near to murder, he even tries to intervene. Chang is an exceptionally talented writer, but his story would have been powerful and angry enough without a disruptingly fancy, and not wholly convincing, narrative device.