Close to the Bone

As in his first novel, The Last Integrationist, Lamar concerns himself with African American identity and interracial romance--here, in a convoluted tale involving several mixed couples and graduates of the same school, Craven University in Delaware. As the O.J. Simpson murder case plays out in the media, Hal Hardaway, a young black executive, is struggling to get along with his white girlfriend, Corky Winterset, who once briefly dated Hal's former college roommate, Walker DuPree. DuPree is of mixed racial heritage, a fact that torments him. Hal introduces the racially confused Walker to a good friend, Sadie Broom; just as Sadie believes she is about to march to the altar with Walker, he becomes suddenly wealthy, a result of his long-lost, white father's inheritance. Walker takes off for Amsterdam to smoke pot and find himself as an artist. There he meets, Eva, a Scandinavian coffee-shop waitress with whom he falls in love; she, however, is interested in Jean-Luc, a Frenchman. Ensuing events bring some couples together and keep others apart. Though it begins with the probing question asked by self-help leader Dr. Emmett Mercy, ""What is a black man?"" Lamar's novel remains mired in the superficial shuttling from New York to Europe of his stereotypical characters. Corky is a spoiled white woman who loves black men; Hal works for a family-owned media and hair product empire that sounds like Ebony magazine. Moreover, Lamar's unexceptional prose does not pull the reader along, and, like much else about the novel, the significance of the Simpson trial never sounds a deeper, more profound note. Author tour. (Feb.)