Reviews of new books. Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story by Gary Indiana (Cliff Street/HarperCollins, 254 pages, $25) LONGTIME COMPANION Gary Indiana is exactly the right person to pen the Andrew Cunanan story. The artist, critic, playwright and novelist used a fictionalized account of the Menendez brothers case as the backbone of his last book, Resentment: A Comedy. In that 1997 novel, Indiana also created a psychopathic rent-boy character who kills for thrills. Greed, consumption, vanity, violence, lust and sexual identity all play a major role in Resentment. The same themes stand out in Indiana's portrayal of the life and death of Andrew Cunanan, the man who murdered a few of his former friends and lovers, a caretaker whose car he needed and fashion designer Gianni Versace. While in the preface Indiana is quick to distance himself from both the Truman Capote school of nonfiction and the Ann Rule school of true crime ("Three Month Fever is a pastiche with which I would like to dissolve both of these unsatisfying modes"), it's apparent that both of these genres feed his style. But Indiana clearly sidesteps the annoying cloak of objectivity those other authors cling to. Indiana splices interviews and police reports with his own musings. He uses italics to emphasize important fragments in other people's accounts. ("Elena later speculated that Bishop's was probably the beginning of his corruption, the proximity to rich kids, the moral laxity epidemic among the monied classes.") Indiana presents a young man so insecure that he self-invents as protection, from himself and others. We see Cunanan's humble beginnings and crumbled potential. We see him as Indiana wants us to--not as a monster but rather a human who is subsumed by our culture of consumption and lashes out at his maker. Indiana's analysis is compelling, but it doesn't have the strength to carry through once the murders start. This is mainly due to the sheer lack of information about this period: The killer, after all, is dead, and so are his victims. Indiana's point is strong--the murders are not as important as the life leading up to them. Still, there's vagueness about how the switch was tripped so savagely in Cunanan, and this seems purposeful on Indiana's part: "I wanted, above all, to make this person palpable to the reader as a person." Caryn B. Brooks Kafka's Curse by Achmat Dangor (Pantheon, 225 pages, $22) FAMILY TREE In an old Arabic legend, Majnoen--"both a name and a madness," writes Achmat Dangor--is a gardener who falls in love with a princess. They arrange to run away together, but the Caliph locks up his daughter, and the gardener, waiting for her in the forest, eventually turns into a tree. The tale provides the seed for Dangor's rich, fantastic and darkly fatalistic new novel. Kafka's Curse begins with Omar Khan, a South African Muslim of Indian descent whose skin is light enough that he can pass himself off as a white Jew named Oscar Kahn. But even in the new South Africa this is a transgression--a madness, even--and he comes to suffer the fate of Majnoen. His story is not unique; over generations his family has strained against the bounds of history and ethnicity only to be reminded of the inescapability of fate. Dangor layers the characters and events of Kafka's Curse into a beautifully intertwined structure suffused with sensuousness and mystery, recalling Alex Garland's The Tesseract and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. He is particularly adept at using magical realism--a relatively recent literary technique that has quickly become hackneyed in the hands of other writers. Even as he revisits some of his character's peculiar ends from different points of view, he maintains a remarkably even-tempered sense of obliqueness. His writing occasionally takes on a purplish hue, but the poetry that imbues much of the book is generally so rewarding that minor flaws can easily be forgiven. Kafka's Curse is Dangor's first work to be published in this country (he's written books of poetry and short stories, as well as another novel), but one can safely reckon him, with Paton, Gordimer and Coetzee, among South Africa's finest writers. James McQuillen Early Harvest: An Anthology of Student Writing from Story Line Press Rural Readers Project edited by Matthew Shenoda (Story Line Press, 95 pages, $8) SCHOOL DAZE Ashland's Story Line Press means well. The small publishing company launched the Rural Readers Project four years ago, sending professional writers to rural high schools to teach creative writing. Story Line publishes the students' work in an anthology; this is the second volume. It's all touchy-feely and nice, but while we hope for the slight spark of Thoreau from our teens in the sticks, what we get is more like a printed version of Rural Kids Say the Darndest Things. We find out that "Spam is kind of like life" and "The most interesting relative I have is my crazy Uncle David." The age and background of these kids certainly should be noted when considering the work, but all one needs to do is check out Lincoln High's amazing literary magazine Polyglot to see a world of difference. While this anthology will surely make a prized memento for the students whose work is published, one wonders if the money spent printing it might be more wisely used on more workshops for the kids. Caryn B. Brooks - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published April 14, 1999