TRAIN

National Book Award Winner Pete Dexter has written a golf novel as violent as a car chase--as sad and syncopated as the blues. It’s 1953, and Dion Graham lets his words drip with the Jim Crow despair of the times. The idiom is black. The caddy master is called Sweet, but he’s not. The greens superintendent is called History as in “He’s history.” Miller Packard--white policeman, avid golfer--gets interested in the golf skills of a black caddy named Lionel Walk, Jr. (a.k.a.Train). Train plays white men on white courses and wins. Packard takes him under his wing, intrigued with the possibility of breaking the game’s color line. But Train has a murder in his past. “The thing to remember about money,” Packard tells his protégé, “is when you get enough of it together in one place, it smells bad.” B.H.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB/ MAR 04]