"Dinosaurs on the Roof"
by David Rabe
Simon & Schuster, 484 pp., $26
The playwright David Rabe's second novel, "Dinosaurs on the Roof," unfolds from an irresistible premise. In the small, depressed town of Belger, Iowa, an elderly widow named Bernice pays a visit to a much younger divorcée, Janet. The two women are connected, in the way of small towns, by Bernice's long friendship with Janet's late mother, and their dialogue bubbles with subtext; each knows rather too much about the other.
On this day, in the novel's opening pages, Bernice has a special favor to ask Janet. The Rapture, it seems, will be arriving in Belger that evening to sweep away Bernice and a few others to their eternal glory. Would Janet, if it's not too much bother, take care of Bernice's dogs and cats while she's away, er, permanently?
The esoteric and the pragmatic meet here, deliciously, and you can imagine the no-nonsense Bernice working this out in her head beforehand: It's all well and good to be carted off to Paradise, but eternity is a long time and somebody's got to walk the dog. Janet, as stunned as most of us might be at such a request, tentatively agrees. And thus launches an unusual day in Belger, as Rabe follows sturdy Bernice and troubled Janet to the next morning's light. Their different journeys and points of view, sometimes interwoven, unfold in alternating chapters.
From this promising beginning, the novel isn't entirely successful; it feels overlong (close to 500 pages) considering that relatively little happens. Rabe, whose many acclaimed plays include "Hurlyburly" and "Streamers," is a master of dialogue, but many of the conversations in this book — while often startlingly realistic — feel unnecessarily rambly. And Janet, a character revealed to be deeply self-destructive (in this novel's few hours she immerses herself repeatedly in drugs, booze and unhappy sex), remains something of a cipher; she's neither likable nor, in her flailing about, particularly interesting.
But Bernice, blinking her way through a day filled with surprises and realizations, grows on the reader. Facing a sudden loss and trying to move on, she feels peculiar, writes Rabe. "Like a bus had dropped her off at the wrong stop. Or maybe a tornado had picked her up from the life she knew and put her down in this one. ... Not that she didn't know where she was and what had happened to get her there, but she couldn't shake the suspicion that what she knew left out everything important."
Fretting, with equal importance, over eternal salvation or the choice of a sensible pantsuit over a skirt, Bernice takes over the novel as the night grows longer. She and Janet — from, respectively, exhaustion and Jack Daniel's — waft from the present into memories, sorting out their lives; caught up in their own raptures. And where Bernice unexpectedly finds herself, at the novel's end, is exactly where we wish her to be.
Moira Macdonald is the movie critic for The Seattle Times.
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