books

Debut Philadelphia novelist Don Silver has a wealth of ideas, and he's not afraid to tell you about them. His novel, Backward-Facing Man (Ecco, $24.95), constitutes a second act in his life, written after 40 on the remains of a 401(k) after leaving the business world for creative writing. And the book covers a lot of ground, moving from the radical '60s to the present day, from Kensington and Allegheny to Belize City, from SLA conspiracy theories to OSHA regulations.

Silver yokes all of these elements together in a relatively simple story: Stardust Nadia, newly orphaned twentysomething, meets a man on a SEPTA train who promises to tell her something about the father she's never known. But to explain this central mystery, he piles on a series of stories from a series of viewpoints, using a modern-day frame involving a Main Line biographer of Patty Hearst, a late-night barroom confession from a retiring G-man, and the saga of a failing family business in the throes of an environmental pollution crisis to illuminate the love triangle at the heart of Stardust's patrimony. Silver covers an enormous amount of ground in the book's slight 300 pages; at the same time, though, all his easy loping prose just barely illuminates his main characters' stories, which wind up "ultimately incomplete — no big revelations, no payoff, no catharsis, no intimation of meaning or symmetry that one hopes to have at the end," as a minor figure puts it.

Even without big revelations, and even with the hyperactive and constant shifts in focus, Backward-Facing Man shows Silver as a writer with the life experience and interest and prose skills to turn out something really great. And even if Backward-Facing Man isn't yet that book, Silver should be worth catching on tour, where he can give free rein to all the ideas he's stuffed into his debut.

Don Silver appears Thu., Sept. 15, 7 p.m., Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400; Sun., Sept. 18, 11 a.m., Writers Room of Bucks County, 4 W. Oakland Ave., Doylestown, 215-348-1663, and noon, Doylestown Bookshop, 16 S. Main St., Doylestown, 215-230-7610; Sat., Oct. 1, Writers Conference at Penn, 10 a.m., registration required, 215-898-6493, and 6 p.m., Penn Bookstore, 3601 Walnut St., 215-898-7595.