Acts of Revision

After success, nothing succeeds like a riveting psychopathic narrator. England's Gregory Lynn, the voice of this distinguished and disturbing debut, is, as he enjoys putting it, a 35-year-old ""orphan, a bachelor, an only child from the age of four and a half."" He's 6'2"" and 263 pounds, has one green eye and one brown one. The novel opens elliptically, with Gregory incarcerated for one or more ""incidents,"" the nature of which becomes clearer as he discusses his defense with his lawyers. The story he tells is harrowing: upon the suicide of his mother, the last remaining member of his nuclear family, Gregory finds a box of evaluations from his school days. On the whole, the teachers were severe, and Gregory feels their harsh judgments doomed him to failure at the outset of his life. He tracks each of them down in the hope of performing what he calls ""acts of revision"" on or with them. Each chapter focuses on one teacher and the subject he or she taught, interweaving elements of Gregory's past with the course of his current vengeance. Some teachers, such as the kindly art instructor, Mr. Andrews, escape with minor samples of Gregory's wrath, but not all are so lucky. Bedford tries to do too much with Gergory: he is a visual character, an aesthete who expresses himself most freely through cartoons, and yet Bedford gives him a sharply verbal mind. Still, the novel is remarkable for a malice that is at once banal and terrifying (and often quite funny). It all adds up to what the punning Gregory would call a s(l)ick little thriller. 30,000 first printing; BOMC selection; German, Italian, French, Dutch and Swedish rights sold; author tour. (Aug.)