cover image Eden's Apple

Eden's Apple

Patri Collins. Carter Press, $9.94 (178pp) ISBN 978-0-9634913-6-7

Poorly developed characters and unenlightening description thwart this first novel. Max, a young slacker who's passively anti-war and anti-American, loses his job because he's so engrossed in the minute-by-minute changes of his chicken pox, an insurmountable trauma to him and a tediously heavy-handed symbol for the reader. Across the city (a featureless, indistinct San Francisco), Eileen learns how to navigate her apartment on one leg. A longtime activist and a recent amputee for reasons unclear, Eileen frets about how she'll get to the rallies protesting the Persian Gulf War. When evicted from his apartment, Max moves to his uncle's house in the suburb of Eden. All beer guzzling, trigger-happy football fans and TV junkies, the indistiguishable patriots cheer on the American soldiers in Eden's bars and mini-marts. Ty, the representative yahoo, suffers a series of misfortunes that challenge his sense of machismo and prime him for the inevitable confrontation with Max. Linked far too late, Eileen and Max's parallel stories add no new insights when they finally intersect. But most importantly, none of the characters in Eden's Apple have any distinction or dimension. The blur between the ``bad guys'' ultimately unhinges the author's efforts to show that Eden's apple/Middle America is rotten to the core: instead, the characters' sameness and flatness far more strongly suggest that they haven't been very closely observed. (Mar.)