The Taming of a Skinhead

...Raymond and his band of followers are portrayed as nothing more than resentful losers who blame minorities for their pitiful lives...

...In Hunters and Gatherers (1995) a lovelorn fact checker for a prominent fashion magazine falls in with a group of earth-goddess priestesses, who chant and drum in the Arizona desert under the guidance of a Native American shaman...

...Be fair," he tells the graduates...

...Ever since, he has devoted his life to saving others, especially political prisoners...

...And in Blue A ngel (2000) a professor embarks on a careening self-destructive course when he becomes erotically obsessed with an ambitious student—perhaps not quite such a stretch of imagination as the others...

...Just enough to learn that Vincent underwent his change of heart at an outdoor rave, amid pounding music, under the influence of Ecstasy...

...Maslow mouths New Age platitudes ("The important thing is to stay open to the miracle when it occurs") at the same time as he worries about using the Holocaust as a trump card...

...The same can be said of ARM, represented by the sad sack cousin Raymond, who appears near the end to recover his stolen worldly goods and to out Vincent during yet another public appearance...

...It turns out he's allergic to nuts and has unknowingly eaten some in his salad...

...He is saved by the remorseful caterer's handy hypodermic, kept at the ready for such emergencies...

...The skinheads who do real damage are absent from A Changed Man: Perhaps the hilarity could not be sustained quite so well if Raymond and company were the genuinely dangerous variety...

...Well, very few...

...Prose has also been called a satirist...

...This is hardly a test case for most bigots...

...We can take it from there...

...But even Bonnie, despite her slavish devotion, realizes that "Meyer insists on having it all at once, history, God and expensive clothes...

...Thirty-two-year-old Vincent Nolan, down and out, with a duffel bag under his arm, a shaven head and tattoos—"Waffen-SS bolts on one bicep and a death's-head on the other"— arrives at the New York City offices of World Brotherhood Watch to offer his services...

...His immediate project is a jailed Iranian journalist...

...Such revelations of moral ambivalence are hardly news...

...Everyone profits from Vincent's transformation: Bonnie gets a new lover, her boys get a much needed substitute father, and Maslow is inspired to leave the corrupting office and return to the Third World countries where his influence is needed...

...To enhance the general absurdity, the action is set in the weeks before and after the execution of Timothy McVeigh, who perpetrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing...

...Reviewed by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Author of the forthcoming 9/11 novel "The Writing on the Wall " Francine Prose's mordant and zany novels have often required a more than customary suspension of disbelief...

...The quasifarcical developments are narrated variously through each of the three main characters, as well as by Bonnie's older son...

...The press loves it: Exskinhead risks life for human rights...

...Just as Bonnie has given up on him, professionally and romantically, Vincent reappears and strides to the podium...

...In the end, she crosses the line from benevolence to sentimentality...

...Not to mention an elegant East Side apartment, a glamorous wife, adoring friends, an Indian cook (rescued from untouchability in his native land), an obedient office staff, and a wide readership for his books...

...In Bigfoot Dreams (1986) we are asked to entertain the notion that a tabloid's Abominable Snowman stories might just have some basis in reality...

...Not surprisingly, there is a love interest, too: Vincent and Bonnie eye each other warily but with growing attraction...

...Brotherhood Watch's gala fund-raising dinner is inadvertently scheduled for the night of the execution, a human rights gaffe that contributes to an already heavy load of irony...

...She was right to do so...

...Maslow seems a bit of an easy target...

...So goes this fast-paced romp through the labyrinth of human weakness, assisted by the extravagant excesses of the media...

...Such passages are good for a quick, if uneasy, laugh, but they make the novel much longer than it needs tobe...

...They promptly hold a staff meeting to "generate some buzz...

...Never a very enthusiastic white supremacist, now Vincent wants to defect from ARM, the American Rights Movement, also known as the Aryan Resistance Movement, and switch his allegiance in order to "help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me...

...The novel comes to a Hollywood finish, as Prose abruptly stops stripping her characters bare for laughs and allows romance and virtue to triumph...

...He wants to be brought face to face with the reality of what he is doing, of what he can do...

...According to that logic, Meyer should be Genghis Khan...

...The opening scene, a small tour deforce of black comedy, ends with the two men side by side, rolling up their sleeves to display and compare their tattoos: Maslow, the blue concentration camp numbers, Vincent the Nazi SS insignia...

...The more favored tool inA Changed Man, though, is the blunt hammer, as Prose explains repeatedly what is common knowledge, to make sure we get it...

...At once a send-up of academic politics and of sexual harassment policies, the book is a spin-off from the magnificent 1930 Josef von Sternberg film (itself based on a Heinrich Mann novel...

...She certainly has a gift for the apt one-liner and the offhand, off-the-wall comic turn, as when Danny writes a school paper suggesting that Hitler was gay and Himmler was his "main squeeze...

...Meanwhile he is scheduled to speak at the local high school's graduation...

...Prose has the hate jargon down pat, as well as the smooth talk of fundraisers and the prefab language of TV talk show hosts...

...They're on the edge of their seats...

...Maslow and Bonnie are seduced not merely by the story and Vincent's apparent sincerity (he has even read Maslow's books, The Kindness of Strangers and One Heart at a Time) but also by his fundraising potential...

...The Vincents of this world must be reckoned with, Prose suggests...

...Since Vincent has nowhere to go and fears that Raymond might hunt him down, Bonnie, a divorced mother of two adolescent sons, is persuaded to shelter him in the spare room of her suburban home...

...We readers have had our walk on the wild side, but we are returned, safe and sound, to Main Street, where everything, even Nazism, can be tamed...

...But the truth is, it is a trump card...

...Moreover, they can be instructive, as she proceeds to show...

...Their publicity person stands ready: "The first thing we need is a press release...

...The ex-halfhearted Nazi plays his new role valiantly, winning the hearts, minds and checkbooks of the rich, until he collapses onstage in a near-death coma...

...And help him in the process...

...In this case, the stranger doesn't ride off into the sunset but becomes a permanent fixture...

...Try to do some good.' He's so simple, so fully present...

...After another public fiasco—Vincent breaks Raymond's jaw on TV when the latter threatens Maslow—our changed man vanishes, dreading that his Brotherhood Watch career has gone down in disgrace...

...A Changed Man is an odd achievement, at once keenly intelligent and highly reductive...

...The terms used to describe Prose's work often allude to sharp-edged instruments: "piercing," "skewered...

...Naturally, the principal wants to suspend Danny on grounds of homophobia...

...Danny is a mixed-up, good-natured 16-year-old with a significant marijuana habit that his mother, in her frenetic efforts to do good, manages not to notice...

...The novel follows a classic fictional paradigm: The stranger comes to town, intrudes on a stable situation, shakes things up, and leaves a forever altered configuration...

...She demonstrates her belief that a man like Vincent Nolan can change—provided, of course, that he is placed in a benign setting, with decent people encouraging him, and that he doesn't need to scrounge for a living but, on the contrary, is fawned over...

...however, in an interview she rejected the title...

...Prose's intent is to expose the vanity underlying all professions of idealism, and she does this most of all through the ambiguous character of Meyer Maslow: Imagine a cross between Elie Wiesel and Jimmy Carter...

...attention must be paid...

...But how many bad breaks does it take to turn you into a guy with SS tattoos...

...What a promotional coup this might be for Brotherhood Watch, which like so many human rights organizations is desperately in need of money...

...What Maslow and his reverential fundraiser, Bonnie Kalen, do not learn is that Vincent has decamped with Raymond's pickup truck, $1,500 in savings and stash of drugs...

...There he will remain for the duration, popping Vicodin and Xanax, getting chummy with the boys, doing his semihonest best to promote "Peace Through Change," indeed becoming a changed man—in his own words, "the kind of jerk who would work for Brotherhood Watch...

...If you've had a tough childhood, everything is forgiven...

...In truth, she is open-hearted, like her characters...

...They have never even committed any real violence, Raymond thinks regretfully, just drunk a lot of beer and indulged in verbal epithets...

...Vincent, trained as poster boy, is the keynote speaker, outshining even the charismatic Maslow...

...As a young man, Maslow escaped death at the hands of the Nazis any number of times...

...The pivotal event of her new book, A Changed Man, however, defies credibility...

...An unlikely turn, but conceivable...

...Once we accept her premises, Prose rewards us with astute and witty commentaries on our current self-delusions and hypocrisies...

...As he describes it, the hatred preached by his cousin and ARM mentor, Raymond, suddenly transmuted into love—an awkward reversal, seeing that the destitute Vincent was dependent on Raymond's largess and living room couch...

...Much harder to believe is that World Brotherhood Watch, led by Meyer Maslow, a 70ish concentration camp survivor and renowned human rights activist, would accept him with open arms, no questions asked...