Book Review | Dexter's weird tales ripped from the headlines

True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number
of Which are Not About Marriage

By Pete Dexter

Ecco. 320 pp. $25.95

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Reviewed by John Freeman

Pete Dexter's bleak, cackling fictions have always felt torn from the pages of a newspaper - and for good reason. Long before he became widely known as the author of

Train

or

Paris Trout

, Dexter was a columnist for the Daily News. He turned to writing fiction in 1985 after he was nearly beaten to death outside a bar by angry readers of one of his pieces.

This dark, luscious little book collects 82 of these columns from the Daily News and, later on, the Sacramento Bee, as well as pieces from several magazines, such as Playboy and Esquire. Reading it is like going on a tour through Pete Dexter's dark places. Here you may see a Sacramento prostitute trying to make rent or the streets of Philadelphia coughing up the city's battered and undead souls.

As a former gas-station attendant and construction laborer, Dexter has a profound empathy for people who work hard to get little. He is also an unflinching reporter of the way such pressure - and the rage latent in so many men - can turn family dramas dangerous. In one column, he describes an old boyfriend kicking down the door of a woman's house and beating her in front of her children. The police take half an hour to arrive.

Dexter writes of violence with a matter-of-fact economy that one might be tempted to call hard-boiled were it but an affectation of style rather than blunt truth. "It is a fact that there are places in this city where the streets belong to the kids who drink on them," he writes in one piece about an off-duty police officer beaten unconscious before his family. "And it is fact that once in a while they kick somebody senseless."

If it's not clear already, this book chronicles Dexter's education in hard knocks. It's also a darn good example of how newspaper life makes you a magnet for the weird. In one vignette, Dexter watches a strongman-for-hire have a 7,100-pound van drive over his stomach. After much bravado, the man waves it off after eight seconds. "You might not realize it," he says afterward, "but that really hurts."

Like all the best columnists, Dexter understood his role was to channel the spirit of his city onto the page. He can be wry and he can be serious, but he always leaves the best lines to other people. One amusing story unfolds in a Philadelphia bar, where Dexter meets a 75-year-old drunk woman who is mean. She keeps picking on "Petey Pete" for having messy hair. "I'd use a hairnet if my hair looked like that," she says.

Dexter emerges from these pages as a comically disheveled character. He turns in manuscripts riddled with bloodstains and swatted flies. He spends a fair bit of time in bars, and with broken body parts. His ear leaks. His wife is humorously long-suffering. Meanwhile, he offers up some wisdom: "I don't know why, but the only place you see licenses anymore are places you are likely to die. Doctors' offices, bars, elevators, and taxis."

Paper Trails is a winning book - the sort you keep around because it's good company and delivers the news in short powerful bursts. The cities are failing us; bad things happen in the night. Whole lives are stuffed onto its pages. But things might turn out well in the end, and the humor assuages. In most cases, these sorts of tales would become fish wrap for tomorrow. But Paper Trails proves Dexter's best work on deadline deserves a longer life.