The Crossing Guard

Through such seminal plays as Streamers, Sticks and Bones, and Hurlyburly, David Rabe has given powerful voice to the often violent conflicts in the American psyche. In The Crossing Guard, adapted from the original screenplay by Sean Penn, he has written an unforgettable novel about parenthood, revenge, and forgiveness.
At the center: Two men on a collision course. John Booth, a man just released from prison, and Freddy Gale, a man so possessed by his thirst for vengeance he will stop at nothing. Not even murder.
At the climax: Freddy's beautiful and sympathetic wife, coping in her own way with the circumstances that have ruined her marriage. And Freddy, on two separate but equally powerful journeys - one, to find out how a man in America comes to terms with irrepressible agony, and the other his manic quest to find John Booth, a man waiting with a gun.

Conflicting needs for vengeance and renewal drive this uneven tale of personal calamity. Since the death of his young daughter, Emily, Freddy Gale has been waiting eight years for the drunk driver who ran her down to be released from a California state prison. On John Booth's first night of freedom, Freddy pays him a drunken visit with a handgun and threatens to execute him. Over the next few days, Booth, still wracked with guilt, and Freddy, lurching into psychosis, try to make sense of what their lives have become?both of them uncertain and rather fatalistic about how their conflict will end. Freddy, estranged from his ex-wife and twin sons, pays little attention to the jewelry store he owns and spends most of his time drunk, in and out of bed with a series of nude dancers. Booth, no longer relating well to his parents or old friends, gets a job on a fishing boat and begins an uncertain romance. Both dream and hallucinate about Emily. Playwright (Sticks and Bones) and novelist (Recital of the Dog) Rabe manages to impose the suspense of a thriller on the haphazard and ineffectual behavior of these haunted men while offering some interesting takes on karmic balance and the sharing of grief. But these characters never become convincingly real. Despite Rabe's vivid prose (the dialogue is biting and true; the descriptive passages sometimes suffer from excessive atmospherics), Booth and Freddy remain ciphers, trapped in a rather uninspired plot.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The publication of this book is planned to coincide with the release of the film, so what we'll have is a media event. The film will star Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston as an ex-married couple, which heightens interest given their famous long-term relationship and breakup. Sean Penn is directing, and he wrote the screenplay. The property was strongly believed in as evidenced by the story the filmmakers are circulating about bringing Rabe in on the novelization. The basic story line concerns three people: an ex-convict just released from prison after eight years for killing a small girl while driving drunk and the girl's parents who are unable to comfort each other because they're suffering in totally different ways. The dramatic tension, the forward movement of the narrative, is created by the father granting the ex-convict three days to live--which allows the reader to become deeply steeped in middle-class suffering as we become deeply acquainted with the middle-class murderer, his middle-class parents, and the middle-class victim's parents. It is probably an excellent adaptation of the screenplay--both may do for drunk drivers what Jaws did for sharks. Bonnie Smothers

Freddy Gale is determined to kill John Booth, who has just served an eight-year prison sentence for the drunk-driving murder of Gale's young daughter, Emily. The discorporeal Emily seems to want the deaths of both men: Booth for ending her life and her father for not meeting her at school on that fateful day. Gale's three-day reprieve to Booth is dramatically given but not appropriately enjoyed. Gale is a disintegrating man; if anything, he shows the damage that unresolved grief and guilt can produce. Mary, Gale's former wife, is likable but less developed. Perhaps the most intriguing character is Emily, now a teenager with a bad mouth and an attitude. Is this what death can do? This undistinguished novel of revenge and wrecked lives is based on a screenplay by Sean Penn, and the publication will coincide with the film version, which stars Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. Despite Rabe's past prominence as a playwright (e.g., Hurlyburly and Those the River Keeps, Grove/Atlantic, 1994), the present offering is recommended only for libraries with demand for film novelizations.
-?Rebecca S. Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.