cover image Red Truck

Red Truck

Rudy Wilson. Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95 (178pp) ISBN 978-0-394-55846-2

Wilson's daring but overly ambitious first novel is written in the voices of Billy-Billy Jump and Teddianne Sayers, two mentally scarred protagonists who, through reincarnation, have connected with each other in several violence-fraught lifetimes. They share a keen love of Christ; Teddianne envisions Christ, who also ""goes on forever,'' as a red truck. Staccato sentences often evoke powerful images and emotions, such as Billy-Billy's description of his near-death by suffocation inside a locked refrigerator at age seven, an incident that claimed his brother's life. But many teasing paragraphs withhold their secrets from the reader who can only wonder what to make of the convoluted concepts: ``Then the yellow started coming . . . . There were hundreds of yellows. . . . I put back my head and opened my mouth to let some out. Then I saw how yellows weren't yellow at all, but were made out of no-color, then only later they changed to become their colorness, yellow.'' Even those who share the author's powerful belief in the transmigration of souls may need a road map to follow Billy-Billy and Teddianne through their various mutations. (May 22)