ESCAPE

Filmic, trenchant, phosphorescent. . . and futile: the flight of Sasha from blame for a fire. by extension from home and school (""No matter how careful he was, trouble usually caught up with him one way or another""), and of older 'Mario' (Audretti), once simply, securely Rudy, now (un)""wanted."" Initially Sasha, stifling his terror, dogs Rudy to clear himself and his friends of the fire-setting charge, and for tong Rudy tries to lose him; but common vulnerability becomes mutual dependence in the course of the flight, and something deeper: isolated, neither can escape tine other's humanity, Any more than Sasha can escape his school notebook (desperate for toilet paper, he won't use that) or, at the close, Rudy can escape inattention: having brought the ailing Sasha to a hospital, he awaits the police with relief, discovers that they're not looking for him. Alan Cober's presence and the format, compounded by the intensity and compression, bring Dorp Dead to mind, but the style is more fluid, the emotional range wider, the observations material--a yellowed headline, a can of tennis balls, a policeman's tune. That it suffers from brinkmanship (Sasha seemingly succumbs at the end of several chapters) which is sometimes deceptive (a gun turns out to be a cigarette lighter) and from a certain squushyness about Rudy's past, is not decisive--for Mr. Hofman is not a storyteller but a projector of the seen and the heard. Which, attended to closely, tell their own tale.