The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 17

B9 The Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, April 25, 1992 BOOK OF THE WEEK -v I JOAN WELLER KIDS'BOOKS I I v. 3 Characters pull down murder story The End of the Pier, by Martha Grimes; Random House; 230 pages; $25 By Michiko Kakutanl La Porte, the fictional backdrop for Martha Grimes's latest mystery, seems stuck in the 1950s, except for the murder of four local women, which sheriff Sam DeGheyn discusses with waitress Maud Chadwick when he joins her every night for a drink on the end of her pier. Sam's unhappily married and Maud's so possessive of her son, Chad, that it verges on mental derangement. Cutting back and forth between the stories of Maud and Sam, Grimes deftly introduces us to their friends and neigh Degrassi hits teens with truth 1 1 ex, alcohol, abuse, depression, drugs and sexuality are the sub-jjects of the six Degrassi Talks 'Books (Mint Publishers, each). These books pull no punches.

They tell it the way it is. They speak directly to teens in a starkly realistic manner. The very intimate style is meant to reach out to all teens to tell them about subjects they may have been afraid to ask about. Each book is introduced by one of the stars of the Degrassi High TV series. Each star has in some way shared a problem covered in the book.

Right ft 'i bors in La Porte: one of them turns out to be the murderer, one of them the next victim. As usual, Grimes nimbly orchestrates the suspense, giving the reader a sense of impending disaster as Sam tries to identify the murderer before he i --v mmtoWm away the reader feels close to the narrator. For example, in the book on sex, star Amanda Stepto, pregnant on the TV show, tells of her own adoption and goes on to interview other teens who have had babies out of wedlock. Both boys and girls are interviewed and tell Paulette Jtles- -Chris Mikula. Citizen ULLDING ROOTS Author's test of romance more interesting than quest to find family Cousins: Getting It All Together Via the Interstate, by Paulette Jiles; Random House; 365 pages; $30 By Maureen Garvie can kill again.

Thanks to several carefully placed red herrings, the reader only momentarily suspects the real killer. The End of ttie Pier, however, aspires to be more than a simple murder mystery, and considerable energy is expended on delineating the characters' inner lives and psychological drives. There are long passages concerning Maud's tortured relationship with her son, and numerous exchanges between different characters on the subject of parents and children. Unfortunately, this favorite theme so obsesses Grimes that it colors all of her portraits, turning each one into a cartoon character defined almost solely in terms of his or her relationship with a parent or a child. Even the murderer is described in melodramatic Freudian cliches that trace his difficulties with women back to his troubled relationship with his mother.

In the end, Grimes's insistence on hammering home this theme pulls the novel down. The reader finds it difficult to care about such one-dimensional characters, and even the surprise of discovering the identity of the murderer fails to make up for the otherwise lugubrious and predictable conclusion. (Written for the New York Times.) Memoir of West needs memoirs Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, by Wallace Stegner; Random House; 227 pages; $25 By Martin F. Kortn the end of the 1960s, Paulette Jiles left Missouri for Canada, and over the next 20-odd years made a life and a name for herself here. She spent a decade in the North as a teacher their stories based on life experiences.

Following personal interviews, the book goes into detailed descriptions of social diseases, including AIDS. Facts about abortion, birth control and counselling follow. With the same first-person narrative style, all the books tackle the other issues facing teens today, with honesty and insight. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, teen date rape, drug abuse, all are given the attention they need to help kids cope. Telephone numbers and addresses are given for all provinces' help programs and services for young people.

These books, published with help from Health and Welfare Canada, belong everywhere that teenagers can pick them up and read them in privacy or with the help of group counselling. Schools, libraries, drop-in centres, doctors' offices should not be without them. (Joan Weller is an Ottawa librarian.) Journalist's memoir inspiring Ahead of Time, by Ruth Gruber; McGraw-Hill Ryerson; 320 pages; $29.95 By Allan Levine espite having lived in Iowa, Inuit phase, her poet phase. Now she circles back to pick up an earlier, half-remembered self she has been missing: "When you get out of your own culture, you can get lost," she writes. On the brink of middle age, Jiles is prepared to end the long adolescence of the child of the 1960s, to embark on the long-delayed phase of adulthood.

She feels ready to pick up threads from a past she once repudiated. Specifically it's her father's family she proposes to study. She has 27 first cousins on that side, most of whom she hasn't seen since she was a child. Her mother's family is a known quantity, but she's always sensed something mysterious about her father's side, perhaps stemming from when her father came back, a disturbing stranger, from the war. Cousins springs in part from the same impulse as Germa-ine Greer's extraordinary Daddy We Hardly Knew You.

Greer's search of her past built to the stunning discovery that her father was not at all what he seemed. His whole history was a fabrication: even the name Greer was fictitious. The Jiles mystery is less dramatic. Paulette Jiles gets some moving insights into her father, but none of them build to so fortuitous a climax. She's committed herself to a chronological structure, and so one of the peaks of the book an adrenalin-pumping near-tragedy when Paulette and Jim wade into a fight outside a Texas club and end up in jail happens right near the beginning.

Ultimately I didn't find Paillette's family nearly as interesting as she did. It's hard enough keeping track of my own family, let alone someone else's. We come to know more than two dozen strangers, which is a lot to keep straight, and I admit I wasn't willing to work very hard at it. The scribbled family tree is a boon, but a couple of pictures and a good map would have been useful aids. These folk pale beside the drama of Paulette and Jim, the crazy poet and the cowboy.

At times the family odyssey seems like an artificial exercise dreamed up to allow two people to be together. Sometimes it feels like a millstone around their necks in the midst of more pressing concerns. Jim has devastated his past, leaving a scorned wife, angry children, lawyers fighting over everything he's built up. Driving all over the South in a leaky trailer in dose quarters with a woman who is by nature independent is a severe test of his mettle. The transition from working with livestock in wide open spaces to transcribing his lover's interviews with her cousins amounts to culture shock.

But the two come through. Paulette Jiles is now Paulette Jiles-Johnson, and lives in San Antonio, Texas. It is extraordinary that these people should find such hope and renewal in each other. There's something almost allegorical in this bond that reweaves strands of American consciousness unravelled apparently so irrevocably in the 1960s. For me, that's the tine mystery and power of this book.

(Maureen Garvie is book editor of the Kingston Whig-Standard. Distributed by the SouthamStar Network.) rooklyn-born Ruth Gruber report ed for the New York Herald-Tri-bune from the Soviet Arctic in North Dakota, Saskatchewan, 'Washington, Montana, Utah, Cali I 1 1934-35 and from Hitler's Germa fornia and Nevada before he and journalist among the Inuit and Ojibwa, then became a figure on the CanLit scene. In 1984 she cornered a large chunk of Canadian Poetry Biz laurels when her collection Celestial Namgatkm took the Governor General's Award for poetry as well as the Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards. Her novel Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola (in the U.S., A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train) won kudos. Three years ago her mother's illness took her back south.

She met a man, who was one reason to stay, her family was another. Was either enough to hold her? Jiles used the writing of Cousins to re-acquaint herself with people and a past she had long been out of touch with. She had a lot of questions to ask, and she was hoping some of the answers would tell her something about herself as well as the community she came from. So they did; Cousins is a singular document, a highly personal distillation of contemporary America. Cousins begins as Polly Jiles lingers for a while in the South after her mother's death.

One weekend she goes with her cousins, Susan-Marie and Priss, to a horse-trading jamboree in the Ozarks. On an adjacent tent site a Texas horseman named Jim Johnson is camping with his son. Johnson and Jiles strike up a dialogue. Johnson is in his 50s, married, a successful businessman with grown children. A lieutenant-colonel in the Vietnam war, he saw a lot of action.

Jiles, in her mid-40s and never married, marched against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and came north with a draft dodger. But by the end of three days, both are thoroughly infatuated. He goes home to wife and family. She returns to Canada. But they continue to talk, and to move towards each other.

She hatches a plan: "My cousins are scattered all over the South; most of them I haven't seen in years, and it occurs to me this might be something else to write about besides my slim white feet. Would this interest him?" she wonders. It would. She goes to her publisher with a proposal of an odyssey into her past with Jim at her side. The project will allow her to return home to dig at her roots, while testing the two of them as a pair, a working team.

The publisher's advance will float them through a tough period while Jim works out a financial settlement with his wife. Paulette Jiles has been through a number of incarnations in her lifetime already: her draft-dodger phase, her ny, Vienna and Poland. Six years later, all her aunts, uncles and cousins were stripped and shot in was 21, and a fair number of other places since, novelist Wallace Stegner hangs both his hat and his heart in the West. Stegner, 83, is most lyrical in this col- lection of memoirs "TV VSS I. hi inv rioJ I -L: 1 1 it I I I and essays about the West when he writes about his life.

Unfortunately, he is his own subject for only the first 40 pages. The rest of the book is absorbing but lacks the memoirs' storylike qualities. "Habitat" com a rolisli Held. She had won her PhD from University of Cologne (on Virginia WoolD and has used her journalism to fight racism and sexism. She also raised a family and wrote 14 other books, including Raquela: prises five provocative essays about climate and geography.

"Witnesses" contains appraisals of writers who have drawn on the West for inspiration. It inspired Stegner to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Angle of Repose and the 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird. (Distributed by Knight-Ridder News.) A Woman of Israel. Gmber's memoir would inspire any young person with a love for our planet and its people and the guts to get out there and meet them. (Allan E.

Levine is an Ottawa writerresearcher i THE OTTAWA CITIZEN'S NATIONAL BESTSELLERS Supplied by bookstores in Ottawa and across Canada. The first number after the title tells last week's rank; the second, in parentheses, gives the weeks listed. FICTION 1. The Pelican Brief, by John Grisham: Beautiful law student faces death threats after her research incriminates White House officials (Doubleday). 2 (6) 2.

Burden of Desire, by Robert MacNeil: PBS's news anchor chronicles Halifax life after the 1917 explosion (Double-day). 1 (8) 3. The Elf-Queen of Shannara, by Terry Brooks: Wren seeks her Elves "to return them to the land of men" (Del Rev). 5 (6) 4. The Road to Omaha, by Robert Ludlum: Comic thriller sequel to 77ie Road to Ganoolfo (Random House).

3 (10) 5. Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton: Murder in the offices of a new Japanese conglomerate leads to a maze of industrial espionage (Random House). 4(11) 6. Hideaway, by Dean Koontz: Scoopathic evil comes up against the transcendent power of love (Putnam). 8(11) 7.

ttsuka, by Joy Kogawa: Obasarts Naomi Nakane, as a young adult, fights for redress of Japanese-Canadian grievances (Penguin). 9 (2) 8. Acts of Faith, by Erich Segal: Three gifted people change as sacred and secular worlds collide (Bantam). 7 (3) 9. Voice-over, by Carole Corbet): Canada's two languages and cultures as experienced by a mother in 1950s Montreal and her daughters in 1 980s Toronto (Stoddart).

1 0 (2) 10. Vox, by Nicholson Baker Man and woman seduce each other on telephone (Random House). 6 (5) 10. See Jane Run, by Joy Fielding: Jane's amnesia drops her into a suspenseful fight for her life (Stoddart). NON-FICTION 1.

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country, by Mordecai Richler: Montrealer skewers Quebec-Canada crisis (Penguin). 1 2. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips: Oscar-winning producer bares the evil and dirt of Hollywood (Signet). 2 3. If You Really Loved Me, by Ann Rule: How a bright entrepreneur manipulates his daughter to murder her stepmother (Pocket).

7 4. Attack of the Deranged Killer Monster Snow Goons, by Bill Watterson: Calvin and his fantasy tiger romp in the snow (Macmillan). 3 5. The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf: What women have suffered in pursuit of beauty and why (Random House). 5 6.

Iron John, by Robert Bly: Myths and fairy tales provide a new definition of manhood (Vintage). 4 7. The Wealthy Barber, by David Chilton: Investment tips in fictional talks with a rich barber (Stoddart). 6 8. Powershift, by Alvin Toffler Future Shock author discusses knowledge power in the 21 st century.

1 0 9. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey: How leaders solve personal and professional problems (Musson). 9 10. Mortal Error, by Bonar Menninger Bullet expert's findings about the slug that killed JFK (SMP).

PAPERBACKS Ranked by local and national booksellers FICTION 1. As the Crow Flies, by Jeffrey Archer: How a fruit vendor becomes department-store magnate (Harper). 1 2. The Firm, by John Grisham: Lawyer is perilously involved in an FBI investigation of his firm (Island). 2 3.

The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy: Forty turbulent years in the lives of a twin brother and sister (Bantam). 5 4. Loves Music Loves to Dance, by Mary Higgins Clark: Singles classified ads lure victims to the "dancing shoe murderer (Pocket). 3 5. Heartbeat, by Danielle Steel: It's a romance between a soap-opera producer and a TV production assistant (HarperCollins).

7 6. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Hams: An FBI trainee and a cannibalistic serial killer team up to halt another mass murderer (SMP). 6 7. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg: Two folksy southern women cope with the 1980s (McGraw-Hill). 8 8.

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie: Ineverently humorous novel about hauntings, hallucinations and eccentrics. It drew the death sentence from the Ayatollah (The Consortium). 9 9. To Be the Best, by Barbara Taylor Bradford: A decision by Emma Hart's granddaughter could cost her the empire she inherited from her predecessor, A Woman of Substance (Bantam). 4 NON-FICTION 1.

Revolution from Within, by Gloria Steinem: From social revolution, feminist author shifts to one of spirit, consciousness and self-esteem (Little, Brown). 1 (1 1) 2. Wealth Without Risk for Canadians, by Charles J. Giv-ens: Safe ways to invest (Stoddart). 3 (22) 3.

Stolen Continents, by Ronald Wright: Author of Time Among the Maya surveys shameful mistreatment of Indians since Columbus (Penguin). 2 (5) 4. Return to Love, by Marianne Williams: Guidance for coping with both interpersonal and international crises (HarretCcfts). 4 (8) 5. Double Cross, by Sam and Chuck Giancana: Brother and nephew of Mafia godfather reveal his contacts with CIA and Kennedy family (Penguin).

6 (2) 6. The New Canada, by Preston Manning: Reform Party leader offers his opinions and platform (McClelland and Stewart). 5 (12) 7. Wisdom of the Elders, by Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki: Applying the wisdom of the world's indigenous peoples to environmental issues (Stoddart). (1) 8.

The Popcorn Report, by Faith Popcorn: Analytical prediction of trends (Doubleday). 9 (8) 9. Awaken the Giant Within, by Anthony Robbins. Self-help guide to controlling mental, physical, emotional and financial destiny (Summit Books). 10 (15) 10.

Backlash, by Susan Faludi: Pulitzer Prize-winner explores eroding status of American women in the past decade (Crown). 8 (9).