Train
by Pete Dexter
A Speeding Bullet
A review by Adrienne Miller
Lionel Walk, a black eighteen-year-old (nickname: Train), makes his living as a caddy at a ritzy country club in L.A. It is 1953, and the men whose bags he carries are uniformly racist and spiteful. Extremely bright and perceptive, Train is also a gifted golfer, and an equally gifted diplomat, one who's very quickly learned not to make waves, either with the white golfers or with his fellow caddies (who turn out to be capable of even more cruelty than the golfers). Train attracts the attention of a white cop named Miller Packard (dubbed by Train, for his inscrutability, the "Mile-Away Man"); the two eventually, at Packard's suggestion, start playing for money at clubs across the country. Packard has also investigated a horrific slaying (by two blacks) on a yacht; he later marries the crime's only survivor, Norah Still. The book's conclusion is terrifying and inevitable. (Feathers are involved.) Train is utterly pitiless in its dramatization of the contradictory nature of compassion. Norah Still, for instance, considers herself the least racist white person around ... until she's raped by black men. And Dexter's characters — vividly-rendered and idiosyncratically-voiced — are so heartbreaking they penetrate like bullets.
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