ALL FALL DOWN

By John Skow

An airliner crashes in the first paragraph of a novel. The author, who, of course, has decreed the time and place of the crash as well as the passenger list, has a number of choices. Does he thread backward, exploring the chilly ironies of Fate's dice rolling? Forward, tracing a bizarre linkage of events unexpectedly tumbled into motion? Does he find sabotage, corporate greed, a pilot who memorized an eye chart he could no longer read?

In his fine, dreamlike first novel, The Light of Falling Stars (Riverhead; 308 pages; $23.95), J. Robert Lennon does start off with an air crash, not far from a Montana town he calls Marshall. But he declines his own generous offer of melodrama (and of irony too, for that matter) and proceeds to a far more interesting narration that amounts to a kind of anti-melodrama. The plane falls, townspeople grieve and attend funerals. But enemies are not reconciled, deep perceptions are not arrived at, lovers do not see each other more clearly and dearly. Paul and Anita, a shakily married couple, continue to split after wreckage tears off part of their house. The estranged former husband of Trixie, an old woman, dies in the crash, and she imagines that his ghost visits her; but the hallucination is incidental to what is important in her life: her gradual slide toward senility. Lars, a decent young fellow, and Christine, his friend who needs a kidney transplant, do not fall in love.

The author follows his characters with care and a measure of affection, and so does the reader. Lennon does not condescend, or marvel at what fools these mortals be. He lets the single survivor of the crash, an old Italian storekeeper named Bernardo, reunite with his American son after a period of walking around dazed and frightened. But what his narration says is roughly this: Most lives are tolerable but fairly dull, a bit confused, and very unlikely to change. Glorious messenger does not come riding, alas. Or so Lennon sees things now. He is quite convincing, and probably right.

--By John Skow