Novelist Cheuse (Candace & Other Stories, 1980; The Bohemians, 1982; The Grandmothers' Club, 1986) here turns to autobiography-cum-historical reminiscence-cum-travel-diary. The result is, unfortunately, an overly ambitious work that fails to live up to its author's complex vision of reconciling his ambiguous feelings concerning his immigrant father. Incorporating pages from his father's description of his life as a Soviet flier (before he ditched his plane into the Sea of Japan and defected to America during the 1920's) into his own memories of a boyhood spent in Perth Amboy, N.J., and his and his son's experiences during a tour of Russia, Cheuse produces a work that is ungainly, awkward in organization, and overinflated in prose style. Part of the problem stems from the lack of drama of much of what both Cheuse and his father have chosen to pass along. The author's memories of his adolescence, for instance, are yet another rehearsal of those Jewish domestic pleasures and perturbations--battling parents, sagacious grandmothers, sexual awakenings and proliferating guilts--that have become clichéd.

I've wanted to read this book for some time, since I listened to Cheuse as the resident book critic on NPR's "All Things Considered" for many years, and always enjoyed what he had to say. FALL OUT OF HEAVEN is nearly thirty years old now, but it still holds up surprisingly well, considering all the changes that have taken place since 1986 when Cheuse was writing it, in the era of Gorbachev's 'glasnost'. Simply stated, Cheuse has woven three story lines toghether: his Russian Jewish immigrant father's early life as a pilot for the Red Army Air Force in the 1930s and his circuitous path to the U.S.; the author's own childhood and coming of age in New Jersey; and the trip he and his 21 year-old son Josh made back to the USSR to retrace the routes taken and places lived by his now-deceased father. Besides his own writing, Cheuse also incorporates stories from an autobiographical manuscript his father left behind.

The story starts off rather slowly, but it gets better as we learn more of Fishel Isaakovich Kaplan's (aka Philip K. Cheuse, the author's father) difficult early life - how his father and brothers emigrated to America, leaving him and his tubercular mother behind. How young Fishka became a pilot for the USSR and was decorated for heroism with the Order of the Red Banner, then, because of injuries suffered in a crash, was forced out of the Air Force, and more. It is, in fact, a fascinating and moving story, one that Fishel/Philip tried for most of his adult life to write down, but in English, a second language. He tried to get the young man Alan to read it and help him get it right, but Alan refused, was too full of himself and trying to become a writer. Only after his father died did a remorseful Alan begin to look at his father's manuscript. As he was writing this book, and making his journey across the Soviet Union's Asian republics where his father lived and flew, he claimed he heard his father's voice. Maybe he did.

This is a good book. I wish I could tell Alan Cheuse that, even if I am thirty years late, but I won't be able to do that. Sadly, Alan Cheuse died last year at the age of 75. He's written a few other books, but I don't think any of them ever made him rich or famous. But he loved books and good writing. We have that in common. Yes, this is a good book, a loving tribute to a father he never quite understood. His father would be proud. Highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )