TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 8/01/97: Soul Kiss By Shay Yougblood Fiction 7/31/97: I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Journal Of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love By Doreen Orion Nonfiction 7/30/97: The Wishbones By Tom Perrotta Fiction 7/29/97: The Triumph of Meanness Nicolaus Mills Nonfiction 7/28/97: Already Dead Denis Johnson Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: Wasted Youth Novels By Andrew Hultkrans Three new novels take you to the throbbing pulse of decadent youth culture -- yawn. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

halfway heaven: _______DIARY OF A HARVARD MURDER ++BY MELANIE THERNSTROM ++DOUBLEDAY ++320 PAGES ++NONFICTION BY LAURA MILLER | as murder/suicides go, it was a prodigy, a departure from the usual pattern of a jealous man destroying his lover and himself. The victim, Trang Phoung Ho, and her murderer, Sinedu Tadesse, were both women, roommates but not lovers, and, most piquant of all, the killings happened in Harvard's hallowed Dunster House, where the girls lived as students of the most prestigious university in America. A writer simply can't go wrong using material this ripe with strangeness and myth, but Melanie Thernstrom, expanding on an article she wrote for the New Yorker, doesn't quite manage to get it right, either. "Halfway Heaven" circles the crux of the story -- the accelerating alienation of Sinedu, who killed Trang for planning to move out of their shared quarters -- without ever managing to land. The raw information is here. Sinedu, an Ethiopian who, unlike Trang, found Harvard daunting both academically and socially, left journals meticulously documenting her growing anguish and resentment. And Thernstrom has done her homework, too, interviewing the girls' families, friends and acquaintances and wrangling with Harvard officials intent on keeping any investigation strictly in-house. What "Halfway Heaven" lacks is imagination. Thernstrom regards poor, mad Sinedu with appropriate compassion and, after establishing a likely DSM-IV diagnosis for the Ethiopian girl (Schizotypal Personality Disorder, possibly controllable with drugs), she sets about "Looking for a Villain," as one chapter title baldly puts it. Thernstrom winds up collaring Harvard itself: the administrators, residence masters, University Health Service, etc. -- all guilty of neglecting the needs of emotionally troubled students. Tragedy, in this worldview, is a result of incorrect diagnoses and failed agencies -- bureaucratic breakdown. And perhaps, in a way, it is. But a writer less sensible than Thernstrom might have made more of it, someone just a bit mad herself, and capable of identifying, Capote-like, with Sinedu's seething, arid heart. There's a faint whiff of something eternal, even Miltonic, hovering around these deaths, a hint of how evil is born. Of a friend of Trang's, Thernstrom writes, "She thinks there were two people in Sinedu -- one was nice and polite and quiet ... but also arrogant, and the other 'really bad like a beast.' When the arrogant person saw that Trang had more family and friends than she did, the beast took over and made her a killer." For "Halfway Heaven" to have amounted to more than a shocking story competently told, its author would need a closer acquaintance with the beast. Aug. 4, 1997 BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html