Coleman's fiction debut has haughty medical student/aspiring psychiatrist Jonathan Parker interning at a rural New York prison in 1901, searching for cosmic meaning against the backdrop of the assassination of President McKinley by supposed anarchist Leon Czolgosz. At the onset, the narrator declares the event forever changed his life.

Bullshit. Nothing happens. Yes, the stranger rides into town; Czolgosz is moved to the prison where Parker works, and Parker repeatedly interviews the assassin, but the plot exists solely to stage abstract discussions so obvious they make Philosophy 101 lectures seem revelatory.

In the neighborhood bar, workers discuss the day's news, their banter like textbooks calling to one another. While mulling the assassination, the proprietor blurts: "McKinley won [the Spanish-American War] for the American people and to free the people of Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish domination. We ought not to malign the President's work while he's lying in Buffalo, maybe on his death bed." To which Parker replies: "The anarchists want to put an end to government. Let's set aside for the moment the question of whether or not the idea... constitutes insanity. Their method, or at least one of their methods... is to kill heads of state. If this Czolgosz is just a foot soldier following the program, you can't say on that basis alone that he's insane. Of course, you can't necessarily say he's sane, either."

If you're interested in the issues Coleman skirts, check out the acknowledgements, a list of academic works the author cribbed for this banal work. Coleman's first book is "Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society." It's a shame he left the nonfiction genre and mind-boggling that someone apparently so well versed in environmentalism could excuse such a tremendous waste of paper.

"The Anarchist"
by Daniel Coleman
Willowbrook, $14.95, 274 pages

Also by Joe Jarvis

NOT MILK?
The kids receive Milk Sucker trading cards, much like those halcyon Garbage Pail Kids, but carrying PETA's agenda: Pimply Patty, Windy Wanda and friends suffer from side-effects of dairy consumption. The cards are a huge hit, although the kids seem decidedly less enthused over the other proferred material, such as pamphlets documenting dairy-industry horrors, complete with photographs of hormone-riddled cows, udders swollen to the ground.
(2001-03-01)

REPAIR WORK
Though this movement has existed conceptually for some time, never before has it physically materialized in such form. And despite the discussions, the organization of reparations remains a logistical nightmare.
(2001-02-08)