Word: fain
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...William Fain, 36, is a model prisoner at San Quentin. He gets along well with fellow inmates and staff and says he has found God. A psychiatrist has concluded that his potential for violence is "probably less than average." So a parole board ordered his release in January. But instead of getting out, Fain unwillingly has become an entry in California legal annals. Twice now he has won a parole only to have it short-circuited by a public uproar-making him the first person to be held past his proposed release expressly because of community pressure...
Californians still have vivid memories of what Fain did one night in June 1967. Driving along a country road in the San Joaquin Valley, he flashed his headlights at the car in front of him until it pulled over. When the other driver, Mark Ulrich, 17, got out, Fain killed him with a shotgun, then raped his two young women companions. Convicted of those crimes and a third rape, Fain drew a life sentence. When word of his impending parole reached Ulrich's family and friends, they formed the Keep Fain In Committee. A petition contending that Fain...
Public outrage about a pending parole is almost never relevant legally. But this campaign worked. Calling the outcry "extraordinary," the board of prison terms stopped Pain's release. Fain may not have been surprised. Six years ago, a 22,000-name petition and a single legislator teamed to block Fain's first parole date. That about-face was upheld by a state appeals court, which ruled that the authorities' "developing awareness of the public hostility" was new information that could be grounds for rescinding his parole...
...narrative of Speedboat jumps around both in time and space as Jennifer Fain, a journalist, relates a series of stories about her past, her friends, her assignments, things she has read or seen. The vignettes, few more than a paragraph long, are juxtaposed with apparent disregard for the way we supposedly perceive reality. However, the jaggedness of the narrative is happily suited to the subject matter of Speedboat, life with "the jet, the telephone, the boat, the train, the television. Dislocations." The reader learns about the characters and events of the book the way Jennifer learns about them: through...
...claims she doesn't believe in evolution. "It seems to me that there are given things, all strewn and simultaneous." That is an excellent description of the way her novel works. All the information is there, but there is no way to piece the fragments together. Life, as Jennifer Fain sees it, resists the ordering processes we try to impose upon it. Because she cannot detect a pattern in experience, she contents herself with collecting examples of the perverseness of life...