Machek's Wake

A GLASS ROSE (308 pp.)--Richard Bankowsky--Random House ($3.75).

The present seems to be deadened by the drone of Hail Marys and weighted by the sweet stench of stale funeral flowers banked around a seven-day-old corpse. The past, for the mourning family of Stanislaw Machek, is a terrain of lust and violence, seen dimly through the murk of love, greed, self-righteousness and madness. In a brilliantly constructed first novel, Author Richard Bankowsky, 29, leads the mourners at Machek's wake, one by one, back across that dark landscape.

Set down in the middle of it without bearings, the reader at first sees only blurred shapes. An undertaker, in the first of a series of long interior monologues, recognizes Stella, Machek's beautiful youngest daughter. With guilt and confusion, he recalls a day ten months before when Stella, a stranger, climbed in beside him as his empty hearse idled at a stop light, said "Take me to your place.'' Slowly some details emerge: he drove her from the Polish quarter of their New Jersey factory town to a cheap Manhattan hotel, later fled, left her to stare vacantly at the ceiling. The symbolism of the recollected scene--the hearse and the casual bed, death and lust--could scarcely be more heavyhanded, but it is a measure of Author Bankowsky's writing skill that the reader nevertheless keeps asking: What drove the girl to it?

Gradually, through the musings of other mourners, the answer emerges. A gentle drunkard, Machek's brother-in-law, dreamily remembers how Stanislaw came to the U.S., how he became foreman in a knitting mill, fathered five daughters. Stella herself appears, a slut (or so it seems) newly married to a fat cloak-and-suiter. As details of her childhood come into focus, the reader approaches the shattered central figure of Stanislaw Machek.

Overcome by his failure to father a son and goaded by his wife's growing insanity, the slow-speaking, stubborn immigrant turned sullenly away from his disintegrating family. Years later, beaten in a bloody strike by his fellow workers, betrayed by his bosses, driven out of his senses by the sight of his wife huddled in the rocking chair she has not left for almost 20 years, Stanislaw drinks himself blind. In a wild rage against man and God, he fulfills his obsession. That incestuous obsession concerns Stella--and, by the story's end, it explains her desperate hop into the hearse.

In unfolding this grim tale, Novelist Bankowsky is thoroughly convincing as he enters successively the minds of a tormented religious fanatic, a furtive, greedy storekeeper, a mentally retarded girl. In each character's rambling recall, his own weaknesses are laid bare and another's motivation is made clearer. But it is the figure of Stanislaw that holds the book together, and in him Bankowsky has created a near-tragic embodiment of guilt. The flaws in this novel--occasional sentimentalism, and a needlessly interjected chapter set a generation in the future--do not detract from its great, raw impact.

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