This Week's Reads

Join Me!
By Danny Wallace (Plume, $14)

Later today, I'm going to send a passport-sized photo of myself to a Londoner named Danny Wallace. A typical Englishman, Wallace can't go without a cup of tea for as long as an afternoon, enjoys Indian food, and wears thick-framed black glasses. He's also a cult leader. When I send him my photo, I'll be joining his cult.

Join Me! tells the true story of how Wallace ended up directing a multinational altruistic association called the Karma Army, whose members commit "random acts of kindness" every Friday. It all begins with the legacy of Wallace's grandfather, whose failed attempt to organize a utopian community inspires the author to unite a thousand good-hearted people in homage to his idealistic forebear.

Wallace's writing is antic and sincere and altogether difficult not to like. He loves wordplay and comic exaggeration— to him, Inverness International Airport is "more of a cowshed got lucky" than a proper terminal. Much of the book's humor derives from his reactions to the offbeat people and places he visits in the course of building the Karma Army. He packs a great many memorable characters into Join Me!, including a fellow cult leader, Dennis M. Hope, who seeks to populate the moon with his followers; and a Metallica-loving Scottish minister named Gareth, to whom Wallace devotes an entire, wonderful chapter.

The quest to amass 1,000 joinees is Join Me!'s plot motor, but two undercurrents give the book its emotional oomph. The sheer number of kind, trusting souls who join the Karma Army, even before they fully understand its purpose, puts the lie to the concept that people are basically closed-minded. At the same time, Wallace's organizing efforts pre­cipitate a crisis with his girlfriend, Hanne, who gives him an understandable ultimatum: Either choose me or the Army.

This dilemma, and how Wallace resolves it, makes Join Me! much more than a gimmicky tie-in to a wild publicity stunt. Wallace finds real passion in cultivating the Karma Army, and his self-deprecating tone is as desperate for attention and almost as endearing as a frantic little puppy. Whether you see it as participatory journalism or a socio­logical experiment run amok, Join Me! proves something heartening about humanity. As Wallace observes of his followers: "They wanted to do good. . . . They just never had enough of an excuse before." NEAL SCHINDLER

Danny Wallace will appear at University Book Store, 7 p.m. Fri., March 19.

Waterborne
By Bruce Murkoff (Knopf, $24.95)

What saved Bruce Murkoff's sorry Holly­wood ass? A painting and the love of a good woman. Balding, unsung, pushing 50, the erstwhile screenwriter and detective-show story editor bought art from blue-chip Suzanne Caporael; she married him and offered to support him while he wrote a book. Some six years later he's a rising artist himself, the most promising 50ish first-time novelist of the year. His debut is both belletrist and hard-boiled—equal parts Guterson poetical epic, Steinbeckish Depression-social-canvas fiction, and Jim Thompson nihilist noir. It begs for a movie option and a place on the lit-seminar syllabus.

Waterborne's nominal hero is Filius Poe, a wellborn Midwestern engineer who exorcises the trauma of a watery death in the family via a job devising the Hoover Dam during the early '30s. He pours himself into it like . . . the punctuated thunder of frothing river water! (Or Murkoff's rhythmically relentless oratorical prose!) The author's engineering of Filius' rather schematic moral universe demands a coglike logical cause for each emotion, and Filius requires a river whose homicidal violence he can thwart and redirect for personal rebirth and the betterment of man. Filius' fate is cast in cement; alas, so is Filius. Marginally more fleshly is single ma Lena McCardell, an Okie homemaker who ditches her bigamist itinerant-Bible-salesman husband and winds up waitressing at the dam-worker town's greasy spoon in Boulder City, Nevada. She takes Filius for granite and likes him that way.

But wait! Switch the soundtrack to minor key. In the third corner of Waterborne's love triangle, meet bantamweight psycho stalker Lew Beck. Only 60 inches high, no sweetie pie, Lew punched his way out of racist L.A. He's depraved on account of he's deprived: Anti-Semites beat him into a life of impulse crime, and upward mobility, from alligator-cage cleaner to dam worker (no cliff could resist his jackhammer head) to gambling-kingpin underboss. Diagrammatically, Lew gets sympathy points for being true-blue to his favorite black hooker and intolerant of racial intolerance.

I like the verbal music of Murkoff's writing about nature (trout "feed on drifting nymphs that tumble in the gravel rubble") and macho gizmos. Yet his compressed detective-story stuff is better than his sweaty efforts to make the earth move. David Mamet and Michael Mann could learn something from his dialogue, which makes them sound remote and rococo. Lew reduces a nose to "a honeycomb of mucus. When he yanked the man's head back, a parabola of blood arced through the air, as if Lew were a magician who'd just pulled a bright red scarf out of his assistant's mouth." Cut and print it! TIM APPELO

Bruce Murkoff will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7 p.m. Wed., March 24.