The Crossing Guard

Conflicting needs for vengeance and renewal drive this uneven tale of personal calamity. Since the death of his young daughter, Emily, Freddy Gale has been waiting eight years for the drunk driver who ran her down to be released from a California state prison. On John Booth's first night of freedom, Freddy pays him a drunken visit with a handgun and threatens to execute him. Over the next few days, Booth, still wracked with guilt, and Freddy, lurching into psychosis, try to make sense of what their lives have become--both of them uncertain and rather fatalistic about how their conflict will end. Freddy, estranged from his ex-wife and twin sons, pays little attention to the jewelry store he owns and spends most of his time drunk, in and out of bed with a series of nude dancers. Booth, no longer relating well to his parents or old friends, gets a job on a fishing boat and begins an uncertain romance. Both dream and hallucinate about Emily. Playwright (Sticks and Bones) and novelist (Recital of the Dog) Rabe manages to impose the suspense of a thriller on the haphazard and ineffectual behavior of these haunted men while offering some interesting takes on karmic balance and the sharing of grief. But these characters never become convincingly real. Despite Rabe's vivid prose (the dialogue is biting and true; the descriptive passages sometimes suffer from excessive atmospherics), Booth and Freddy remain ciphers, trapped in a rather uninspired plot. (Oct.)