The Bridge Builder's Story

Venerable writer Fast (The Immigrants), master of the heart-tugging historical drama, delivers a moving tale of tragedy, inner healing and absolution. Married only 11 days, pacifist American engineering student Scott Waring and his wife, Martha, are arrested by the Gestapo in May 1939, while watching a Nazi rally in Berlin, where Scott is imprudently carrying his grandfather's pistol. The Nazis wrongly suspect them of conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and Scott is forced to gaze through a one-way mirror as SS thugs beat Martha. Told that Martha will be killed unless he confesses, Scott concocts a confession, but, shortly thereafter, the Nazis murder her anyway. Chance gives Scott a chance to escape his captors, and the Jewish madam of a whorehouse facilitates his route to the American embassy, from where he returns to the U.S., devastated. When the narrative jumps forward 1951 and Scott's sessions with his New York psychiatrist, we learn of his guilt over Martha's death, which has left him sexually impotent; of his U.S. army service, in which he blew up German bridges; of his searing trip to Buchenwald after the concentration camp's liberation. Then Scott falls in love with Greenwich Village dancer and waitress Janet Goldman, a Holocaust survivor who had been raped and beaten by the Dachau camp commander. Eventually Scott finds that he is able to love again. Fast is anything but subtle, but he has written a solid, well-constructed novel that is both a forceful meditation on evil and a poignant love story. 50,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo. (Oct.)