STREET GAMES

By John Skow

Here's a short, gritty novel whose elegant construction calls to mind the way Greg Louganis used to dive and Larry Bird and Kevin McHale used to work the back-door play. "Yes!" the amazed onlooker would realize, watching these masters. "That's how it's done!" Madison Smartt Bell's Ten Indians (Pantheon; 272 pages; $23) catches child psychiatrist Mike Devlin just short of burnout, mortally sick from seeing damaged children. He is no longer surprised, for instance, to notice an eight-year-old boy who has come to him with cigarette burns on his body scissoring the crotches from plastic soldiers. Nothing new, but "Devlin realized with a dreary fatigue," the author writes, "that he would be obliged to discover the reason for this detail."

Hoping to dodge his devils, Devlin pursues a second skill. He is a Tae Kwon Do adept, and though he is white, middle aged and middle class, he opens a gym to teach this Korean martial art in Baltimore's black ghetto. This is both inspiration and folly, redoubled because he encourages his 17-year-old daughter, who also knows Tae Kwon Do, to help out. The neighborhood's young black drug dealers are pragmatists, eager to learn the fighting discipline for self-protection when they are sent to prison. Devlin, an idealist trying shakily not to unravel, commits too much of himself. And despite his efforts, gunfire sweeps through the streets. People die.

The working out, told partly from Devlin's viewpoint and partly, in convincing street language, from that of the drug dealers and their women, is spare and cinematic. Devlin, far out on a lonely voyage, saves his honor. Saves his daughter too. But it is the neighborhood that wins. Good ending, good novel. The author's most recent book before Ten Indians was All Souls Rising, a panoramic, 530-page historical novel about Haiti's slave rebellion in the 1790s. A lot of readers of the new novel who never read Bell before are going to be digging that one out of libraries and paperback shelves.

--By John Skow