THE PAPERBOY. By Pete Dexter. Random House. $23. 307 pp.
The title of Pete Dexter’s strong new novel, The Paperboy, refers to the job the narrator takes at the opening.
A swimmer for the University of Florida, Jack James got fed up with practicing, drank a bottle of vodka one night and emptied the team’s swimming pool.
Expelled for this vandalism, Jack has nothing better to do than go back to his home town of Lately, in northern Florida, and drive a delivery truck for his father, William Ward James, the beloved publisher of The Moat County Times, whom his friends call W.W. or World War.
But the novel’s title also refers to what Hillary Van Wetter, a death-row inmate at the Florida State Prison in Starke, calls all newspapermen.
“These the paperboys?” he asks when two reporters show up to interview him.
And thereby hangs the tale of violence, hypocrisy and betrayal told by Dexter in a book that combines the newspaper setting of his previous novel, Brotherly Love, with the Southern milieu of his Pulitzer Prize-winning earlier novel, Paris Trout.
Hillary Van Wetter is on death row for the murder of the local sheriff. Community outrage over the crime is such that even Jack’s father, opposed to capital punishment as he is, has neglected to register an editorial protest.
But Jack’s elder brother, Ward, is fast becoming a star investigative reporter for The Miami Times. Ward and his partner, Yardley Acheman, have been approached by Charlotte Bless, one of those women who are sexually drawn to condemned men. Charlotte has asked them to prove Hillary’s innocence so she can marry him.
Sensing that the convict might have been railroaded, Ward and Yardley start digging and hire Jack away from his delivery job to drive for them.
In a powerfully drawn jailhouse scene where Hillary is torn between lust for Charlotte and contempt for his would-be saviors, he hints that he was out stealing lawn turf with his uncle the night of the sheriff’s murder.
When Ward and Yardley confirm part of this alibi, they discern a story that, as the narrator sums it up, will expose Moat County as “an enclave of ignorance and smallness in a state which was growing in another direction,” and Hillary Van Wetter and his “naive defender” Charlotte Bless as “the casualties of an inevitable war of clashing cultures.”
Although this cluttered summary tells only half of Dexter’s story, he has written as sparely here as in any of his previous books, and most of what carries the reader along so irresistibly lies beneath the surface of his prose.
The one flaw of the story is the exaggerated extent of Yardley’s villainy. Described as a reporter who has “no interest in facts” – “It was a shortcoming for a newspaperman, I suppose,” the narrator muses, “but he never saw it himself” – Yardley betrays Ward after their story wins a Pulitzer.
He signs a book contract; moves to New York City and starts hanging out at Elaine’s; keeps pressing his publisher for more money, but makes little progress on the book. Then, when the story is exposed for having holes in it, he blames Ward’s hospitalization for its shortcomings.
But then of course there are such characters in reality, just as there are actual people like the character of Helen Drew, a reporter for the rival Miami Sun who uses her seeming helplessness to dig out the facts that eventually destroy Yardley and Ward. Yet in contrast to such harsh villainy is Ward’s own agony over the accuracy of his reporting.
