The Law of Gravity

Cottrell's first novel is ingenuous, mildly amusing and sometimes poignant. It's also derivative of too many other picaresque bildungsromans narrated by wide-eyed, poor white Southern boys, from Tom Sawyer to Forrest Gump. After 12-year-old Patrick Gunn's mother is killed in a car wreck, he is sheltered by his Granny until his abusive, alcoholic father takes him to live in a trailer park near Memphis. Pat's chronic truancy leads to a third move when a court orders him to live with Mrs. Armistead, a wealthy, grandmotherly foster parent under whose influence the urchin grows miraculously civilized (or at least to like books), reverting only rarely to his feral former self. In a thinly contrived plot device, Pat's father shows up and kidnaps him to a cheap Nashville motel, from which the boy escapes only to find Mrs. Armistead in the hospital. When Pat learns that his father has been found with his throat slit, and that he is wanted for the murder, he runs away with a neighbor boy who is suffering his own troubles with a broken home. The two are then taken captive by a menacing pair of backwater villains, giving Cottrell a suspense hook from which to hang a novel that, cliched-ridden as it is, offers some real pleasures of storytelling and voice. (Nov.)