"Paper Trails" | Pete Dexter's newspapering days

"Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which are Not about Marriage"
by Pete Dexter
HarperCollins, 289 pp., $25.95

Pete Dexter's bleak, cackling fictions have always felt torn from the pages of a newspaper — and for good reason. Long before he became widely known as the author of "Train" or "Paris Trout," Whidbey Island resident Dexter was a reporter and a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. He turned to writing fiction in 1985 after he was nearly beaten to death by angry readers of one of his pieces.

This dark, luscious little book collects 82 of these columns from the Daily News, and later the Sacramento Bee as well as several magazines, including Playboy and Esquire. They have been assembled here with the help of Sports Illustrated editor Rob Fleder, who has stripped them of their providence and chronology. As a result of this de-newspaperizing, reading "Paper Trails" is like a tour through Pete Dexter's dark places. Here is a Sacramento prostitute trying to make rent, the murdered grimly glimpsed, the streets of Philadelphia coughing up their battered and undead souls.

As a former gas station attendant and construction laborer, Dexter has a profound empathy for people who work too hard to get so little. He is also an unflinching reporter of the way these pressures — and the rage latent in so many men — can turn family dramas dangerous. In one column, he describes an old boyfriend kicking down the door of a woman's house and beating her in front of her children. The police take half an hour to arrive.

Dexter writes of violence with a matter-of-fact economy that one is tempted to call hardboiled, but it's not an affectation of style — it's blunt truth. "It is a fact that there are places in this city where the streets belong to the kids who drink on them," he writes in one piece about an off-duty police officer beaten unconscious before his wife and kid. "And it is a fact that once in a while they kick somebody senseless."

If it's not clear already, this book chronicles Dexter's education in hard knocks. It's also a darn good example of how newspaper life makes you a magnet for the weird. In one vignette, Dexter watches a strongman for hire have a 7,100 pound van drive over his stomach. After so much bravado, the man waves it off after 8 seconds. "You might not realize it," he says afterward, "but that really hurts."

Like all the best columnists, Dexter understood that his role was to channel the spirit of his city onto the page. He can be wry and he can be serious, but he always leaves the best lines to other people. One amusing story unfolds in a bar, where Dexter meets a 75-year-old drunk who is mean. She keeps picking on "Petey Pete" for having messy hair. "I'd use a hairnet if my hair looked like that."

Dexter emerges from these pages as a comically disheveled character. He turns in his manuscript with blood stains and swatted flies. He spends a fair bit of time in bars, and with broken body parts. His ear leaks. His wife is humorously long-suffering. Meanwhile, he offers up wisdom like: "I don't know why, but the only place you see licenses anymore are places you are likely to die. Doctors' offices, bars, elevators, and taxis."

"Paper Trails" is a winning book — the sort you keep around because it's good company and delivers the news in short powerful bursts. The cities are failing us; bad things happen in the night. Whole lives are stuffed onto its pages. But things might turn out in the end, the humor tells us. In most cases, these sorts of tales would become fish wrap for tomorrow. "Paper Trails" proves Dexter's best work on deadline deserves a longer life.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.