Mica Highways

Admirers of Hazelgrove's highly regarded earlier fiction (Ripples; Tobacco Sticks) may be dismayed by his overripe prose in this dark tale of Southern racial hatred and murder spanning three generations of an aristocratic Virginia family. Haunted by the troubling enigma of his mother's death on the day of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Virginia-born Chicago stockbroker Charlie Tidewater leaves his job and marriage and the ""mica highways"" of the North to visit his granddaddy in Richmond. As the conundrum begins to unravel, Charlie is stalked by shadowy figures who try to intimidate him into going back North. He meets and becomes enamored of a young divorced mother whose father, a respected judge, seems to have some sinister connection with Charlie's past. Told in the third person, the narrative cuts between the present and events concerning Charlie's family as far back as 1927. Unfortunately, Hazelgrove indulges in overwrought and pretentious prose: ""Charlie turned to the windows in their lightless dimension, seeing something he couldn't place, but felt in the void he was seeing."" Despite the mildly intriguing plot, even the most forgiving readers may be put off by the author's self-conscious straining to find literary Nirvana. (Nov.)