Various Antidotes

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 31, 1994

``When a girl was recalcitrant, I used the whip . . . There is nothing more instructive than shame . . .'' begins ``Dorothea Dix: Samaritan,'' the best of these 11 stories by an author whose previous three novels ( Fading, My Parmacheene Belle , etc.), have displayed an incandescent imagination and a fine grasp of her craft. While her imagination has not faltered here--each of the tales hinges on a clever idea and is wrought with precision--some of them fail to move the reader. Several of the stories concern scientists caught in the grip of obsession. Each pays an emotional price by alienating his family; some, in addition, suffer a crippling loss of innocence about the world. The protagonist of ``Concerning Mold Upon the Skin, Etc.'' is the Dutch lens maker Anton van Leeuwenhoek, whose discovery about the microorganisms swimming in a drop of water comes at great cost to his daughter; the 17th-century anatomist in ``Nowhere'' wants to perform autopsies in defiance of the law, but discovers that the man whose body he has dissected has been murdered for that purpose by the infamous Billy Burke. The most compelling stories have first-person narrators whose voices grip the reader. Observing the surreal world of her Coney Island amusement park neighborhood, the old woman in ``Convicta et Combusta'' is sure she will be hanged as a witch. The narrator in ``Tumbling'' has Huntington's chorea. She is an attendant in a lab where mice are being raised for scientific experiments, and their treatment portends the torments she will suffer. Some stories stretch too hard for their effects; one admires Scott's dexterity but finds them dry and and somewhat contrived. On the whole, however, this collection offers further evidence of Scott's versatility and talent.