Into the Light

In 1962, Dwight Cope and his grandfather Hazard Harker attend a baseball game in Chicago's Wrigley Field, and the narrative switches back and forth between their thoughts. The author next introduces cross-cut scenes of Dwight's job as a copy boy for a newspaper, his father Raymond's desertion of the family and mother Vera's death by suicide in a car crash. Then Vera's thoughts while she is pinned under the car are given in stream-of-consciousness form, while Hazard's life (and eventual death) is shown in the same way. Despite skillful writing, this hodgepodge of literary techniques nullify rather than enhance each other. In addition, Dwight's fedora, his addiction to vintage movies, his employment in a Front Pagetype city room, and the preeminence of baseball in the lives of the working poor create an uneasy mixture of '30s images set in the '60s, adding to the reader's confusion. January