SAVAGE GRACE BOOK SERIAL
SAVAGE GRACE BOOK SERIES

After killing his mother, Tony calmly picked up the phone and ordered Chinese carry-out. It does this not with 'clean' emotions the familial details are too messy and cruelly witty - they cut to the bone. Savage Grace puts the sting back into family violence. And, here, the book's circular theme and format again comes into focus: the penniless immigrant who left a dying Europe with the American dream gave birth to decadent royalty who finally self-destructed with an incident in a London penthouse.

SAVAGE GRACE BOOK SERIES

I laughed - a grave offense to those who cannot laugh! I thumbed my nose at my father and at the sheepism of Man.' But then, in a series of long monologues, Brooks remembers his inventor grandfather with such compelling frankness and poignance that it humanizes Brooks. I was always successful in everything I wished to do. (When informed of the affair, a friend commented drily, 'Sons and lovers - nobody knows the difference anymore.') Meanwhile, as Tony's paintings became more and more bizarre (pictures of his mother decapitated, etc.) and his behavior violent (especially after Brooks ran off with Tony's 'girlfriend' Sylvia), Brooks refused to pay for Tony's psychiatric care, dismissing the mental health field as 'professionally amoral.'Д«rooks threatens to become the heavy of the book, continually hanging himself with such arrogant reveries as, 'I was always free. WHEN IT WAS learned that Tony was enjoying homosexual encounters, his father began refering to Tony as 'her son,' while Barbara, taking a gamut of drugs along with Tony, seduced her son supposedly to 'cure' him of his homosexuality. Brooks spoke with pride to an acquaintance that his young son had the imagination to tear off the wings of flies to experiment with the theory of 'equilibrium.' Francine du Plessix Gray remembers staying with the Baekelands in France, where a teen-age Tony methodically stole jars of baby food intended for du Plessix Gray's infant. (Brooks's choice of reading material was the Marquis de Sade!). As a child, he was required by his doting father to read aloud to cure his stuttering problem.

Tony's father, Brooks Baekeland, was an adventurer whose family money bankrolled Brooks' expeditions to Peru to search for lost Incan cities and kept his family in glamorous splendor in New York, London, Paris, and various other vacation digs.

William Styron described him as an 'absolute young Adonis.' Tony's mother, Barbara Baekeland, was another beauty with a shock of violent red hair and a propensity for hedonism and masochism. Who or what is to blame in this tragedy? Or was it a mere folly, collapsing into greed, the pursuit of social distinction and power? Tony Baekeland by all reports was an enchanting child.

In this way, the reader sifts through the often contradictory material in the same manner as a juror hears evidence at a trial. And at the end of the book there is a roll-call reference of the participants - a biographical glossary of all the little foxes. Letters, psychiatric reports, interviews only add to the sense of sustained morbidity and doom. The format is essentially like a relay race in which dozens offer pieces of story before handing the baton to the next runner. Authors Robins and Aronson have chosen to present the story in documentary fashion, as an Edie-like oral history. There is something quite grandiose, operatic, and, of course, finally banal in this resolution. It tells the story about the great-grandson of the inventor of plastics, who was brought up to be brilliant, was encouraged by Robert Graves and James Jones to pursue a career in painting and poetry, had homosexual affairs, slept with his mother, killed his mother with a kitchen knife, spent time in a psychiatric hospital, was released in a bureaucratic foul-up, stabbed his 88-year-old grandmother eight times, and, finally took his own life, smothering himself with a bag over his head - a plastic bag. Doctorow adorning the book jacket, Savage Grace lives up to its advance notices. With high praise from Norman Mailer, William F. It's a chilling wedding of a Mommy Dearest with Long Day's Journey Into Night.

SAVAGE GRACE BOOK SERIAL

With brutal clarity and in horrifying detail they subvert and revitalize what has been labeled 'soap opera,' mating the classic (the serial aspects and the emotional sweep of the form) with the trendy-trashy. Aronson present the Baekeland scandal of a few years back - plastics heir kills mother. In Savage Grace, authors Natalie Robins and Steven M. UNDERNEATH EVERY soap opera there is another, more potent one wanting out. Is the author of the forthcoming 'The Soap Opera Encyclopedia.' September 15, 1985

Savage grace book