THE FORK RIVER SPACE PROJECT

The photographs of National Book Award winner Morris have received accelerating attention recently (Conversations With Wright Morris, p. 72), and here he chooses to meld two events--the young wife of a novelist runs off with a house painter and a tornado scoops up a good-sized hunk of town--by tilting the ""craziest happenings"" into crisscrossing camera perspectives of time, light, and magnitude. The Space Project, a slide projection show of space views accompanied by 2001 sound and patronized mainly by young backpackers, is shaman-ed by Harry, house-mate of painter Dahlberg, and these seem to be the two sole inhabitants of ghost town Fork River, which was visited by a twister during WW II. But attending the show is just one occasion for narrator-novelist Kelcey to meddle with mysteries: he speculates on the nature of a twister which could dig in and keep on digging; he ponders Dahlberg's double-track fictional past; he ruminates on the eruption of football mania in what was a glacier-caused canyon. As Kelcey at home and on the trail Elides in and out of time-warp, everything and anything seems possible--whether UFOs or a departing wife--if you're waiting, like the cave primates, or the inhabitants of Fork River, or maybe Kelcey, for something to happen. Wildly fanciful and written in a drum-head tattoo of economical imagery ("". . . the funnel shape up on the horizon, dipping and swaying, or a pillarlike column that is almost transparent, like a rain falling""), this flying object takes a chapter or two to get on board, but then you'll travel wondrously fast and far.