After Gregory

Wright's fifth novel, a dark, allegorical parable about the links between identity, the past and the need to write, reads like a cross between Paul Auster's The Music of Chance and an episode of the '50s TV series The Millionaire. Peter Gregory is an English teacher at an Ohio high school who tries to drown himself after two events: an incident with a female student in which he's accused of statutory rape; and an auto accident in which he swerves into the wrong lane while inebriated and kills an entire family. But Gregory's survival instincts get the better of him and, after crawling out of the river, he decides to hitchhike across the country to New York and assume a new identity. While on the road, he encounters Machiavellian billionaire Jack Rome, who gives him a huge sum of money with the condition that he forfeit the cash if he attempts to go back and put his sordid past in order. Wright's (Tony and Susan) ruminations about the modern tendency to shed the past at a moment's notice and become instantly mobile strike a vital chord, and he offers a story with enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning pages. The female characters are strictly throwaways, though, and not much better is a stumbling subplot in which Rome makes Gregory go to Venice to rescue a young woman who's come under the spell of a religious cult. Ultimately, however, this novel-told mostly in the unusual second-person singular-is about writing as a way to reconcile our past with who and what we become; it's Wright's brief but stirring conclusion on this subject that makes the book so special. (Sept.)