Volume 38, Number 3 · January 31, 1991
Betrayals
By Patricia Storace
Killing Mister Watson
by Peter Matthiessen
Random House, 372 pp., $21.95
Health and Happiness
by Diane Johnson
Knopf, 260 pp., $19.95
Death is the unspoken hero in this pair of novels, one with its terse, masculine title, the other festively evoking Jane Austen. Diane Johnson's book is, surprisingly, a comedy about death, how death rules social life, a comedy incongruously set in a hospital. Peter Matthiessen's novel is about murder, and the consequences of the power to murder, not only the murder of other people, but the murder of thoughts and feelings and the natural world, as a coastal Florida community of small farmers, fishermen, and plume hunters is paralyzed by Mister Watson's presence, and corrupted in subtle ways. It is also about the macabre glamour with which people can invest a man who has killed. In Matthiessen's book, the murderer is the prince of a black fairy tale; his crimes, whether they are real or imaginary, have a mesmerizing effect on his community, like the fascination of witnessing achieved desires, happy endings. For Matthiessen's people, death holds the urgent mystery that sex does for children. They are transfixed by Watson's casual power over life and death. It makes him seem superhuman.
Review, 5283 words
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