Dread (New American Fiction Series) - Hardcover

Professor of literature at the University of Colorado, Steiner (Bathers, Passion, Quill) has created an elliptical and dreamlike story that is as haunting and disturbing as it is elusive. Divided in two parts, Dread begins with "Not Keller," the story of a pair of couples traveling in Europe and the Middle East. Hilly, the wife of the narrator, leaves him for Keller, a mysterious man in a bathing suit encountered on a cruise ship. The narrator finds himself bound to the loathsome Keller in a semi-paralyzed search for Hilly, who seems to have left Keller and gone native in Cairo. Theirs is an uneasy alliance: " . . . 'Did you know,' Keller said one afternoon, 'that when you blow your nose you look into your handkerchief afterwards? Back there in that town, I replied, I saw a hair in your biscuit but didn't tell you. You swallowed it.' " The second half of the story, "Keller," is told in the first person of a character named Keller, but is it the same man, or is it our first narrator in another mode? (And is Keller a killer, or are we meant to think of kell as in caul?) Mirroring the first section, "Keller" offers an alternate text, and can be read in a number of ways. Like Roth's The Counterlife, this novel challenges by taking repeated advantage of the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. Unlike Roth, however, Steiner's writing can run to turgid prose that belabors its enigmatic purpose.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The shadowy figure of Keller moves through Dread pursuing women (Hilly and Marie), broiling his skin in the sun, chapping it in cold like a man affronting reality. Dread is dreary. Keller postures in the desert, on a ship, at a skiing village, among whores and tourists to no discernible end. The novel moves back in time, dissolving any hope of character study or plot by feeding on its own ungenerous prose and oblique images: "I was stunned to have found you, and so embarrassed to be watching you without your knowledge that my shoes felt wet." Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.