The plot of the story is relatively simple: Ned Giles, a city boy from Chicago, finds himself orphaned before he is 17. He works at a local club, serving the wealthy, and it is there he encounters the invitation to join the Great Apache Expedition. Because he is not rich, he is not invited, but he hopes to join the expedition as a paid photographer. He begins his journey to Douglas, Arizona where the expedition is forming. By sheer dumb luck, he gets the gig. He also encounters Tolley, a young homosexual Princeton man whose father is constantly trying to turn him into a man. Ned had met Tolley previously and the meeting resulted in Ned losing a job. (Ned took pictures of hunters and their prey – Tolley insisted on being photographed holding the bull’s penis – his father was outraged and demanded that Ned be fired.) The two establish an unlikely friendship. Margaret Hawkins, the young anthropologist also joining the expedition, is quickly embraced in their circle of friendship. A young boy, Jesus, aligns himself with Ned and joins him as a helper. Joseph and his grandson Albert, Apaches, are hired on as scouts. The rest of the expedition is made up of rich white boys, whores, and army men. It’s nothing more than a big safari with all the comforts of home. The expedition was a PR stunt to boast the failing economy.

As the expedition is forming, Billy Flowers, a crazy fanatic contract game hunter has treed the young girl and brought the “heathen” into town. (Flowers is described as looking like something straight out of the Old Testament. He believes that God told him to leave his wife and children and become a contract hunter. There is a horrible scene where he holds a trial for his dog, Tom, who lost the desire to hunt. The end result is a dead dog.) The girl is about 14 and dressed for her womanhood ceremony. Menstrual blood stains her legs and her beautiful dress is in shreds. Her village has been destroyed; her mother and aunt raped repeatedly and murdered before her eyes as she hid in the bushes. There is a bounty on Apache scalps and she watches as her loved ones are scalped. She is a fighter and a bit of a biter; she manages to sink her teeth in a young boy and the priest before she’s tossed in the jail cell and left to die. Ned comes to photograph her and is appalled at the stench and her obviously deteriorating state. The officials urge him not to enter her cell as she will bite him; Jesus is terrified of her. Ned not only enters the cell, he pays the jailer for more time with her and bathes her. It’s a very intimate moment. Ned describes it as taking care of a wounded animal.

Deals with the governments have never gone over well for the natives, and this deal is no different. There is a lot of bloodshed. The kidnapped boy is hung. Several of the expedition members are killed and scalped. Ned ends up killing Juan and scalping the bastard. The Apaches flee into the hills where the Mexicans & Americans cannot and will not go. Margaret chooses to stay with Charley and the band as the anthropologist in her cannot refuse the opportunity to live with the last renegade Apache group. Tolley returns to Princeton. Ned leaves. He knows he couldn’t have a life with Chideh and she couldn’t have a life with him. An epilogue tells us that she bore him a son and told this young boy about his amazing father and the amazing world he would return to them from one day. Ned began visiting the Apache reservation, telling them that he was married to an Apache girl and one day he would return to her. Fergus leaves it up to the reader to decide if he ever did.

The novel was published from 1847-48 and its original serialization explains all the filler; Dickens did the same thing but Dickens did it better. This book made me want to scream. I hated Becky Smart. It’s an understandable response; Thackeray creates her to be hated, but he initially lures the reader into being on her side so it stings a bit more when you realize what a callous little wench she is. Becky uses and abuses every person who comes into her life who may serve as a rung on the ladder to riches & societal recognition. She tricks Rawdon into marrying her, fools around with everyone and anyone. She has a kid she hates and pushes away but will call on his name in a heartbeat to appeal to the softies for money/love/attention. She’s a bitch and, when push comes to shove, she’s no more than a common whore. Mid-way through the novel, I found myself hoping Thackeray would off her. With only 25 pages left, I was all but pleading that she be found floating face down in some river. But no, death’s too good for her; Becky ends up selling trinkets at the fair (after murdering Jos and running out of his money).

Amelia Sedly is nauseatingly sweet & prim & proper. I loathed her. I didn’t even care when her husband starting screwing around with Becky. (Yes, Becky is her BFF – talk about your early GOSSIP GIRL episode…) She gets pregnant, her husband dies (thank goodness), she has a son who is the spitting image of his father, they have no money anymore, blahblahblahblah, poorsadexcuseforalifeandaplot. Her in-laws hated her and the marriage because her family fell from societal grace prior to the wedding and they did not want their son to marry her anymore because the Sedlys were nothing. He disobeyed his family and his father dropped him cold. (Same thing happened to Rawdon, interestingly enough) Woe. Sad. Gnashing of teeth. The paternal grandfather falls in love with his grandson; he uses the boy as a means to atone for the way he treated his son. Amelia, Emmy, ends up giving the boy to him to raise so that little Georgy can have everything the world has to offer. *Gag.* There’s other domestic drama with her parents. A horrible scene where she buys her son books and her mother goes nuts because they don’t have any food to eat. Blahblahblah. The best part of the book is when Becky tells her that her dead husband, the guy Emmy’s been deifying, had cheated on her less than a week after marrying her. Or when Dobbins finally realizes that Emmy isn’t worth that love he’s been harboring for her for over a decade. “No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you. I knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning; that I was a fool, with fond fancies, too, bartering away my all of truth and ardour against your little feeble remnant of love. I will bargain no more: I withdraw.” Thank you, Dobbin, for finding your balls after 15 years.

So Becky does do a good deed and get Emmy and Dobbs back together, but Dobbs never loves her the same. (Thackeray wasn’t a fan of the happy ending.)

There are other characters – none of them too pleasant or likeable, to be quite honest. Jos is a fat joke who Becky plays like the piano she uses to charm so many. Rawdon is not that impressive at first, but he actually becomes a pretty decent guy toward the end; his treatment of his son is his redeeming quality (or it was until he gives his son up to take an assignment overseas where he dies).

There are war and death and sex and plays and lots of alcohol. There are cards and duels and ponies and religious sermons. There are pretty dresses, French phrases, and dogs. There are jewels and French-maids who make off with them. There are flowers and dancing and tears and funerals. There are lies and half-truths and tainted love.

It only took 680 pages… (Yawn.)

I shouldn’t bash it so much; it really wasn’t THAT bad. It’s late and I’m in a bad mood. (Speaking of which, I also apologize for any ramblings/errors/etc that could occur under such conditions.) I understand why Thackeray wanted such a lengthy novel (more installments = more money), but one could easily condense this novel down, scale back on some of minor plots, and flesh out a killer story on the parallels between Emmy and Becky – I wouldn’t read it, but someone could totally do it.

That said, there’s no way this novel was not on Mitchell’s mind when she wrote Gone with the Wind in 1936. She swears she didn’t read it until after her novel was published, but the similarities between Becky & Scarlett and Melanie & Emmy are not coincidental. Mitchell’s book is FAR better and not nearly as vain, however.

Abani creates other memorable characters: Iggy, she hangs from metal hooks on her back and tattoos physic readings into her guests, and Bomboy are just as developed and interesting as Black. Ray-Ray, the black dwarf who works at Iggy’s store, appears briefly as some comic relief (seriously –how funny is a black dwarf who quotes Raymond Chandler while serving coffee on stilts?), but his death and Black’s response to Iggy’s reaction is a turning point in the novel. (Ray-Ray dies of an addiction to “wet” – formaldehyde-soaked joints.) Sweet Girl and Black’s dead mother are also carefully developed and work to define Black for the reader in powerful but not constrictive ways. Perhaps the most vibrant character is LA – the sights, sounds, and colors used are bursting with life – bleak despair with brilliant hope create an excellent canvas to paint this novel about a “lost” artist.

About a year ago, I saw Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (2006) and I had to make it mine. After finishing Paton off the other night, I knew I needed something that would make me lol all over myself and there you were, sweet Troost. Getting Stoned exhibits the same brilliance as his first work and I’m hoping that Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid (2008), recently purchased and not yet arrived, continues this trend of genius. (When I publish my book – either Kiss my Lotus: One White Girl Lost in the City that makes Hard Men Humble or Me & My Motorcyclin’ Mormons: Adventures in the Land of Smiles – it is Troost I want to write my blurb.)

In The Sex Lives, Troost follows his then-girlfriend, Sylvia, to the atoll of Kiribati. They pretend they are married so he can join her for her job. In Getting Stoned, he has been itching to get out of the business world of DC Hell and, having married Sylvia (he figured they did such a good job at pretending, why not), he urges his wife to find another job in the South Pacific.

Just before the start of the book, the reader finds a disclaimer that reads:

“The author acknowledges that he is not Bob Woodward. Mr. Woodward is scrupulous with names and dates. This author is not. Mr. Woodward would never suggest that something happened in October, when, in fact, it occurred in April. This author would. Mr. Woodward recounts conversations as they actually occurred. This author would like to do that, but alas, he does not excel at penmanship and he cannot read his notes. However, the author has an excellent memory. You can trust him.”

This is indicative of Troost’s writing style; it is full of biting humor and has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge personality that makes it the perfect book to take to bed with you.

Troost opens the work by admitting that he is an “unapologetic escapist.” After returning to DC from Kiribati, he finds himself missing life in the South Pacific and even thoughts of swimming in the same water the natives shat in cannot sway him. He wants to go back. Working in DC, he is forced to take a long, hard look at himself and comes to the realization that he does not want to be there, that he has no desire to be yet another monkey in a suit.

“…when I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed my gray suit, my Brooks Brothers shirt, my silk tie, and my soft leather Italian shoes, I realized that I was not such a person. I felt like a tourist, dreamily walking through a life that was not meant to be mine. Some people are attracted to power. I would rather be plucking a ukulele on a faraway beach. I was not a soft-leather-Italian-shoe kind of man. I was a flip-flop man.”

When the company decides not to renew his contract (he is a consultant and bringing in nice $$$), it is very clear that Sylvia is going to have to take them on a new adventure. They planned on Fiji. They had passed through there on their way back to the States after living in Kiribati and they had enjoyed it. It sounded like a paradise and a place for Troost to work on his book about their time on the atoll. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the political climate in Fiji took a turn for the worse. The couple headed to Vanuatu instead.

On Vanuatu, they learn about cannibals (the last recorded incident was in 1969, which, as Troost points out, indicates that there should be people alive who dined on human flesh for fun), kava (this is how Troost gets stoned – kava roots are chewed by young boys, mixed with water, passed through a sock, and served in a shell. A man’s man takes it one whole shell at a time. A sissy boy or a woman takes it in half-shells. The first time Troost enjoys Vanuatu kava, he does not come back down for two days. It is some powerful shit and he becomes a fast fan once he learns how to consume it in moderation), they stand on the rim of an active volcano (they also haul ass back down with the thing blubbers and spits at them), and they find out Sylvia is pregnant. It is an odd place for the pair, who reside as expats whom the natives call “master,” which is quite disturbing to the foot-loose and fancy-free, equality for all, Troost.

Vanuatu is not the best place to deliver a child and when Sylvia reaches the point where she looks like she has swallowed a volleyball, they decide that Fiji has calmed down enough for them. Fiji starts off on an interesting note; Troost goes in a week ahead of Sylvia and, in less than 24 hours, is accosted by cross-dressing prostitutes. The fear of being sodomized results in the flee scenario. Luckily for Troost, his would-be attackers are not willing to remove their heels to chase him.

Fiji is not all bad and their son Lukas is born in a Fijian hospital. He becomes Troost’s little ratu, little chief – which, as Troost learns the hard way, is not what he should call the baby in front of real ratus.

At the end of the novel, the escapist longs for his roots. He realizes that there is no real paradise and they will forever spend their days looking for it. They decide to create their own paradise by settling in and making a home for their little boy; they decide to return to America.

A white man, Paton picked up the cause for equality and founded the South African Liberal Party, which the National Party eventually disbanded because it had both white & black members. (Apartheid was a bitch of legislation.) However, Cry, the Beloved Country was published and making its way across the world before apartheid officially reared her ugly head.

The novel is about a black pastor, Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu, who lives and preaches to his people in the tiny village of Ndotshéni. Ndotshéni is typical of most South African native villages in that the people are poor, the food is scarce, and the youth flee into a city that swallows them. Stephen Kumalo’s son and sister have both vanished into Johannesburg with not so much as a letter in months. The novel opens with Stephen learning that his sister is ill and that he must go to her. He and his wife pool their scant resources to prepare for a trip he does not know how long will take. The money they had been saving for a stove and new parson’s robes all go to getting him to the city. There, he knows he will also seek out his son, Absalom. He is worry-filled, as he knows not what he will find.

When he gets to Johannesburg, after a long awe-filled train ride, he is robbed in a clever way; a young man tells him he will buy the bus ticket for him at the ticket office if he will hold their place in line. Stephen, trusting of strangers, agrees and hands over some money. The young man never returns; Stephen later learns there is not ticket office and that tickets are purchased on the bus. The journey does not improve for the man: he discovers his sister’s illness is that she is a whore who has been arrested for making & selling liquor. Her son lives in squalor with her and other women of the same tainted occupation. Stephen, though a pastor, is also human and is mortified at the shame his sister has placed on him. He pulls them both from the “home” and they move in where he is staying with Mrs. Lithébe, a generous lady and friend of the Church. He also seeks out his brother John because he learns that Absalom remained friends with his cousin, John’s son. John is a changed man; he has abandoned the Church and God and taken on a very political role in Johannesburg. He can move masses with his voice and the power is slowly corrupting him. The government is biding its time before rushing in and arresting him. Stephen is amazed at the changes in both his brother and sister, changes that he blames on the city. He learns about his son, learns that he is running with bad company, has been sent to a reformatory, and has impregnated a woman not his wife.

The novel details the steps Stephen has to take in finding Absalom. He eventually does; his son is arrested for killing a white man, the worse crime imaginable. He did not intend to kill the man, but was startled and fired. The young man he killed was a huge advocate for equal rights and well known the world over for his writings on the subject. (This young man had an obsession with Abraham Lincoln and his library is filled with book after book – I am sure I do not have to explain the importance of this.) It was friendly fire – Absalom took the life of someone who was fighting for him, not against him. To make it worse (or better), the young man grew up on a farm just outside of Ndotshéni and his father, Jarvis, is well known to both Absalom and Stephen.

Stephen and Jarvis, the murderer’s father and the deceased’s father, develop a tentative relationship when Stephen returns home with his sister’s son (his sister has left, back to her old her life) and his son’s pregnant wife (they had someone marry them while he was in jail). He also creates a relationship with the dead man’s son, a young boy whose father had been teaching Zulu. Jarvis, a man who had never shook hands with a black man until his son’s funeral, picks up his son’s legacy. He provides Ndotshéni with milk to keep the young healthy. He promises to build a better church. He establishes a dam and brings in educators to teach the youth how to farm so that they will not leave for the city. As for Absalom, he is sentenced to death by hanging.

The novel is written in a slightly chaotic style, with dashes to indicate dialogue. This gives the novel a rushed pace, a sense of spiraling uncontrollably into something that cannot be stopped.

I will leave you with a quote, one of the few that title was born of:

“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.”

It’s an intoxicating read. Set in Peru, the novel has an exotic life to it. How much do I love novels that breathe? It’s a playful read – a teasing novel that winks at you over its shoulder and beckons you to join the darker side. It’s a perfect example of what makes South American literature so irresistible. Her jungle is full of Natives, shamans, witchdoctors, poison darts, crocodiles, monkeys, parrots, sex, gringos, rebellion, debauchery, the virgin, and paper. Lots of paper.

Cellophane centers around Victor Sobrevilla, who as a young engineer seeks out his fortune by making a paper factory in the jungle, and his family. Issues with race come up early and Victor’s younger sister is born with slant eyes and yellow skin; his mother can no longer hide her Chinese heritage and the family is shunned. His father gets shot while visiting the local whore for her talents in the bearded oyster, a scandalous sex act. He is buried a hero. Victor’s young sister is killed when the carnival comes to town. But the secret of his ancestry is exposed when the “evil eye” descends upon his hacienda. It’s not the only secret exposed; no one can stop themselves from telling the truth. Husbands admit to not loving their wives. Priests admit to scandalous love affairs in the woods. Privileged light skinned men admit to “coolie” grandparents. There is something appealing about the truth-telling, but it results in the destruction of the factory. (There is an excellent conversation where Victor’s son, Jaime, is expressing love for a native – from the headshrinkers tribe – who has sought refuge with the local shaman. He thinks his father is against it because of her skin color. Victor explains that flesh can lie; he is part Chinese yet his flesh doesn’t reveal it. He maintains that flesh is nothing. It’s a beautiful sentiment. His refusal to accept Jaime’s love is due to the fact Jaime is married already and it’s a sin against God.)The sex in this novel is brilliant. There is a scene where Victor’s daughter, Graciella, is preparing to have sex withe Luis, the American cartographer. She is married and unknown to her, her bastard of a husband (who has been MIA for five years) is lurking in bushes. Also in the bushes is a tribesman with his poison darts. He sees the American, tan and blonde, and thinks he is a god. Then he sees Graciella, wearing nothing but cellophane. The moon winks against the cellophane, her womanhood is described as being the color of a mango. The native thinks he is watching the coupling of gods and begins to slip away. He then sees Nestor and realizes Nestor intends to kill the golden god. He silently darts him. Later, Nestor’s shrunken head appears as a necklace. Great stuff. The relationships are cleverly detailed, created, and maintained. The use of animals is genius and something else I adore about South American literature. The laughing mastiff cracks me up.

There is a fantastic scene where Victor is explaining why he decided to start making cellophane (all the problems started the day he created the first perfect piece). It’s the ability to see through it that appeals to him; cellophane doesn’t conceal anything and neither do the people in his life anymore. But what you learn is that cellophane distorts what it holds, the true truth is not revealed. And so the honesty of the hacienda begins to cause problems as the truths become twisted, distorted, and misplaced.

I loved the life of this book. Arana is an excellent story teller. Reading her novel is like spiraling through the jungle on the back of a wild animal. You just hold on and wait, breathless, for what’s going to happen at the end.

The author, Gary Shteyngart, (author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook) puts himself in Absurdistan as an unseen but very present professor who is one of the main villains in Misha’s life. Jerry Shteynfarb, the author of The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job, is a professor at the college where Misha sends his ghetto-fab girlfriend Rouenna. Rouenna eventually leaves Misha for her professor and ends up pregnant and begging Misha to take her back as Jerry has taken a teaching job in France. One of the best lines is Misha’s response to the email from Rouenna:

“I don’t usually feel revulsion (everything in my world is kind of revolting in its own way), but Rouenna’s message brought me to the brink. A lifetime on the streets of the Bronx, and after all that pain and horseshit, she gets pregnant by Jerry fucking Shteynfarb. Who the hell had sex with a Russian writer without using a condom?”

I chuckled aloud when I read that, serious lol-ing. I love when authors can laugh at themselves, can makes themselves part of the fictional world they have successfully created.

Misha is an obese Russian who came to the States to get his multicultural degree from Accidental College. This education strongly instilled in him the opinion that everyone should strive to be western in their actions, looks, arts, etc. He constantly pulls on this education throughout the novel in the most absurd of ways.

His relationship with his father is really the root of his problems. The reader eventually learns that his father has sexually abused him but that Misha never saw it as sexual abuse; in fact, Misha is heartbroken when his father stops touching him. He feels like he can never live up to his father’s expectations, but he hates his father, hates what his father has done to him. (He has mixed feelings about his Papi – it was never a black & white relationship.) His father is the reason his penis is massacred and a “purple little insect.” (His father insisted he be circumcised upon arriving in the states and his khui had been scarred.)

“It would seem to the untrained eye that the khui’s knob had been unscrewed from its proper position and then screwed back into place by incompetents so that now it listed at an angle of about thirty degrees to the right, while the knob and the khui proper were apparently held in place by nothing more than patches of skin and thread. Purple and red scars had created an entire system of mountain-ridge highways running from the scrotum to the tip, while the bottom had been so eviscerated by post-op infection that instead of being smooth, taut skin, it looked like a series of empty garbage bags fluttering in the wind.”

Misha’s sad little penis is very much a character in the book and his heaven is often described as the feeling he got the first time Rouenna kissed the underside. It gets a lot of action: touching, petting, kissing, licking. And Misha is always playing with it, much like his father had done when it was still big and beautiful.

The reader soon learns that Misha is not allowed back in the US because his father had killed a man. His father’s motivation had been to keep Misha with him, but his father is murdered and Misha is abandoned in the Russia he abhors. Misha fucks his stepmother (which everyone seems to know about) and then flees to Absurdistan with his manservant where he has been promised a Belgium passport, which will open the world up for him again.

While in Absurdistan, civil war breaks out between the Sevo and Svani. Initially, Misha isn’t really affected; he finds Nana, a dark skinned Sevo tour guide who studies at NYU. Her dark skin and love of NY are the only things he needs to fall in love with her. Nana’s father is huge in Absurdistan and Misha is pulled into the politics, the very absurd politics, in a land where oil (or no oil) is king. Nana’s father convinces him to appeal to the American Jews for monetary support. They decide that a Holocaust museum would make the Jews more willing to give money. The proposal of this museum is freakin’ hilarious. It concludes with the following:

Outcomes – First Year of Operation

1) Two hundred thousand Jews will sow an additional one hundred thousand Jews on the Caspian Sea.
2) Two to four thousand lackluster Jews will become born-again Mormons (or whatever the hell) and will stop pulling the rest of us down.
3) Twenty thousand Jewish children will learn that it’s somehow their fault.

It is a brilliantly insane novel and has made a very short list of favorites. (Okay, maybe not so short…) I loved this porky Russian Jew and was sorely disappointed when I reached the end of the novel. Shteyngart is, well – I can see why one shouldn’t fuck a Russian writer without a condom.

I didn’t like it. I wasn’t floored by her “wit” and “mastery” of language. I wasn’t “seduced” or “captivated” by what The New York Observer described as “beautifully executed.” I’ve had better, much better. Smith’s story had me yawning. And I’ve read enough and studied enough to stand behind my dislike for this novel. One rookie reviewer (i.e. University student) compared it to Beloved. Seriously? Have you read Beloved? I’ll grant the middle section of the novel with its fragmented style has similar results on the reader as the middle passage section of Morrison’s great work, but this is no Beloved. It doesn’t even deserve to reside on the same shelf. Maybe I’m being harsh, but it pissed me off that I didn’t like it. I wanted to like it, maybe that’s the problem.

The novel is about the Smart family who are on holiday in Norfolk. They’re all fucked up people and entirely disconnected from each other. On the outside, it’s all roses. Two beautiful, smart children (Astrid & Magnus), the mother, Eve, is an author and the father (or stepfather), Michael, is a literature professor.

Astrid is losing herself in an attempt to find her father. She feels like a piece of her very existence is absent because of the role, or lack of role, Adam (her father) has played in her life. She finds love letters between her parents and attempts to make them real. One such example is her father’s desire to capture every sunrise on tape and give it to her mother to show his love and how much she means to him. Astrid attempts to capture all this on film. She is constantly filming because of the desire for proof; to know she was.

Magnus, the golden child, has become sullen and withdrawn after a classmate’s suicide. He plays a joke on a girl he does not know to gain the attention of the older, more popular boys. The joke results in her killing herself. He is plagued with such guilt that he stops eating, bathing, living. He wants to die. He is ready to die. He feels the dying is his punishment for the sins he has committed.

Michael has been fucking his students for years, thinking his wife doesn’t know (she does). He picks them, sometimes not wisely, and fucks them. At the beginning of the novel, he is preparing how he will seduce this particular student. But she comes in, disrobes, and leaves him wondering if he fucked her or if she fucked him. He wonders if he is losing his touch.

Eve is broken. Her children are broken. Her husband is broken. Her writing career is broken. She’s a second-rate author dealing with writer’s block. She spends her days sleeping on the floor of the shed, pretending to be writing. She doesn’t want to deal with her children. Her children remind her of Adam and that makes her want to destroy them, especially Astrid. She can’t stand her little girl most days.

So the broken Smarts take their fragmented lives and pathetic existences on holiday, where they have an accidental (or maybe not so much) encounter with the beautiful, devilish, barefoot angel who changes their lives and attempts to thread them back together. This angel, Amber, is thought by Eve to be one of Michael’s little whores. Michael thinks she is one of Eve’s friends. Magnus just thinks she’s a sign from the heavens that he is supposed to live. And Astrid is captivated by the attention she’s shown by this mysterious stranger.

The entire family falls all over itself for this stranger. Michael wants to fuck her so bad he writes hideous sonnets about it. She seduces Magnus and they make love in the church as if his life depends on it. (In a way, it does. Amber saved him from suicide. He probably wouldn’t have been successful in his attempts, but her soft hands and eyes are what talked him down and made him want to live.) Eve is also seduced and longs for this woman’s approval. Astrid follows her around like a little puppy dog.

Amber breaks them even more, but in a way that the pieces can be fit together. That all the Smarts can start to rise, more whole than they’ve been in ages. She also robs them blind, right down to the carpets and the knobs on the heater. She forces them together, to connect. Eve finally breaks the spell and forces her to leave and the novel comes to an enigmatic conclusion with Eve becoming Amber in the States.

Yawn. I’m sure Smith is a talented writer but a mediocre novel is like mediocre sex, easily forgotten.

I picked up Saving Fish from Drowning not because it was Tan; the main pull of this novel for me was its setting of Burma. The novel was clichéd, its characters too archetypal and underdeveloped, and the narrating style was inconsistent and annoying at times. There was a lot that Tan could have done with the story and with the characters that just never happened in the 472 pg. novel.

The novel is narrated by a dead woman. Wow. Shocker. That’s never happened before. There’s an interview with Tan where she’s asked if she’d been influenced by The Lovely Bones. That question makes her a bit rowdy and she quickly responds that her work had been started well before the publication of Sebold’s novel. (Sebold’s novel is fantastic if you rip out the last forty pages.) The main problem with the narration is that it is inconsistent and at times is too much Tan.

At times it seems like Tan is attempting satire, but her attempts make the reader wince. In the New York Times Book Review, the work is called patronizing to both the readers and the Karen people. That’s a pretty accurate assessment.

I’ve been to Burma. I visited a border town and had a day pass. We were not allowed to stay overnight and we were not allowed to leave the town. We did not know about the boundaries until we were stopped by several uniformed men holding guns. They did not speak English, but gestured with their weapons that we should turn around. And turn around we did. It was interesting to stay on the banks of a river that ran between the two countries. It was interesting to eat our dinner and drink our Singha while looking out over a poverty-stricken Burma.

Tan also talks about the drug laws in Burma. She’s not kidding. When we crossed over, we saw the signs that made clear in many languages that drug trafficking and use results in death. When I was at the Golden Triangle, I could see the armed Burmese guards protecting their shores. We were told that they would shoot anyone without question who ventured on land.

Enough about my Burma…

Tan is a good writer and her mastery is in creating and exploring relationships, especially those between mother and daughter. There are some excellent passages in the novel that make you, as a reader, just go “yes!” I especially loved Wendy and Wyatt.

“Wyatt had not answered her question, she noticed. He did that a lot lately, giving non sequiturs in lieu of answers. Was he falling out of love? Or had he never been in love? Lately, what she felt when she was around him were twinges, pangs, aches, cracks, rips, and sudden hollows. His every response, or lack of one, hurt her. Maybe she was feeling this way because she was hot, sticky, and cranky.”

Several pages later…

“Wendy had not yet recovered from her perceived rejection by Wyatt, but she pretended that all was fine. She chatted and flirted, yet she had a sick pang of fear in her chest. She was looking for proof that he felt equally warm toward her, which was – well, it was hard to say exactly, except that she knew he felt none of the uncertainty that she did. He was perfectly at ease with their being together, as he had been, she imagined, with every woman. Why was he not concerned whether he felt more for her than she for him. Why didn’t he worry over whether he had given more than she had? Did he feel no risk of emotion? When her eyes began to sting with tears, she pretended a lash had caught under the lid, and she rubbed at her eye. He, in turn, raised her face to his, to see if he could help extract the offender. To see such concern from him filled her with even more desperation, and she wrapped her arms around him. He instinctively did what she craved. He kissed her, clutching her buttocks. And in joy, she blurted the forbidden words: ‘I love you.’

To his credit, Wyatt continued to kiss Wendy, covering her mouth so that she did not utter anything more along these lines. He had been expecting her to say this, afraid she would. He liked Wendy a lot. She was fun most of the time, except when she was analyzing everything he said with those searching eyes. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

I sympathized with Wendy; I think I am Wendy. Of course, Wendy and Wyatt don’t stay together and, of course, that’s exactly how Tan concludes their little relationship. Fun stopped, he left, found out he had a kid 11 years ago, Wendy moved on, stopped being superficial, and found something more akin to real love and not desperation. All’s well that ends well.

I think I’m done with Tan for a while again.

Trent is a Gates County. Trent is every poverty-stricken farming community in rural northeastern North Carolina. Parker captures the people of this type of environment so well and in his characters, I saw so clearly the people I grew up around. Towns like this breed two sorts: the type who settle and starts a family and the type who dream of escaping and either succeed or go crazy. In escaping, they often learn they have to go home again; that the town is a part of them that is ever so hard to shake.

Towns without Rivers is the story of Reka Speight and her brother Randall. Chapters flip-flop between the two as they seek each other, love, happiness, purpose, and everything else we want out of life.

The novel starts with Reka at ECU listening to Bob Smart, a representative from a publishing company, offering college girls the opportunity to go out west and sell books for the summer. She has been out of jail for two years and has been plotting her escape from Trent. Even though she is not a college girl, she sees Bob Smart as the ticket she can use to escape the town where she will always be the white trash bitch who killed her rich boyfriend. Five years in jail and the forgiveness of Edwin’s mother will not erase that stigma. (She did not kill him on purpose. It was his father’s doing – Edwin was addicted to morphine and his father was peddling it to him in the hopes the addiction would run her off. Edwin begged her for another injection and, not knowing how much he had already had, she gave the love of her life what he had wanted.) Bob calls on her to speak and she panics and flees – she does not belong on that campus with the rest of those girls. He finds her later, gets her to admit that she is not a student, promises to take her onboard anyway, and fucks her.

“Eureka took Bob Smart’s hand when he offered it to her. She took a drink of his whiskey and she took her clothes off in the air-conditionless hotel room and she took what she could from him only because she’d reached that point where she could no longer punish herself by staying in a place she’d hated so much she’d killed a man to leave it.”

He comes close to not taking her. He had promised her the job just to sleep with her. But Reka’s a hard-ass and threatens to tell his wife and boss about how he generates business. He agrees to hire her, fucks her again, and sends her on her way. She ends up in Red Fork, Montana – a town without a river, a town with only one escape route.

Meanwhile, her younger brother Randall is in Norfolk living with his brother Hal and working at the shipyard. Hal gets drunk and leaves one night without a word, leaving Randall with Delores, Hal’s girl. Of course, Randall ends up in bed with Delores and of course, she closes her eyes and pretends he’s Hal. After they have sex, they have a conversation that changes the course of his life forever.

“‘ You’re like me, you know. You’re not like Hal at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
She put her chin on his chest and stroked his cheek. ‘Poor baby. You don’t know, do you?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about love. You ain’t got it to give away. Can’t dish it out or take, either one.’

…Y’all’ll do anything. You don’t care about other people so much as you care about yourselves. I take it back, I’m not like you. I want to be sometimes, I’ve wanted to be since Hal left, but now that I think about it, I’m just like him.’
Randall didn’t argue with her. He wasn’t interested in what she was like, or what she thought she was like.”

He moves out and away from Delores. Later, his dad comes to visit and see the ocean. He’s also there to tell Randall where Reka went. He drowns while Randall reads the letter Reka had left for him. Randall goes back to Trent for the funeral, where his siblings blame him for their father’s death. He and Reka had always been the “different” ones – the ones who didn’t belong. He starts on his journey to find Reka, decides to take it slow, and spends some time in Chicago posing nude for art students for money. He sleeps with the students, men & women alike, and each time he is reminded of Delores’s comment – she’d been right.

Meanwhile, back in Red Fork, Reka has befriended Maggie – a sad, lonely woman who pushed her son away and blames her husband for it. When Maggie leaves town to visit a newborn nephew, Reka ends up sleeping with her husband, Jake. But it isn’t just sex – Reka has fallen in love with this silent man, so unlike her Edwin. Their love affair is short-lived. In his effort to locate Reka, Randall told Bob Smart about her criminal past (not maliciously – he was thanking him for giving her a chance) and Smart fires her. She leaves without a goodbye and heads to Seattle, hoping to find the son who’d run away. Before he’d left, Bob Smart had told her that her father died.

“Since learning of his death she had seen him everywhere. He’d never traveled west of Rocky Mount in his life, yet on the bus to Seattle she’d seen him walking through a sopping field outside of Spokane, the morning sun in his eyes, his pantlegs muddy to the knees. Here in Seattle homeless Indians slept in wads of blankets in the shallow shelter of storefronts, and several times she’d seen her father among them, his gray-black hair and sharp bones peeking from tattered covers. He walked by her once right there in the market, while she was watching a ferry churn slowly through the water beneath a galaxy of gulls. And when she ignored the water for land, he appeared beneath her on the docks, toting the end of some piece of equipment, disappearing just as she recognized him into the hold of a ship. Your father? He’s dead.”

That is perhaps my favorite passage of the entire novel, which at 354 pages has many passages.

Reka finds Heath, tells him who she is, what she was to his father, and befriends him. She loves everything about Seattle and feels as if she has finally found a home, a place she belongs. Jake leaves Maggie and seeks out Reka and Heath. Reka finds herself faced with the prospect of a real family and knows she has to find Randall before she can let herself embrace it.

Randall, with his nude pictures in tow, heads to Red Fork. He lost the photograph he had of Reka and only has art students’ portraits to use as a likeness. “She looks like this, only not a man.” He ends up showing the pictures to Maggie who calls the cops and has him arrested for being a pervert. Jake bails him out, but before Jack can get up with him to tell him about Reka, he’s vanished. He finds his way back to Trent and goes crazy in the swamp.

Reka eventually ends up pregnant and back in Trent, where Randall has gone batshit crazy, and Reka has to save him – save them all.

Parker does for North Carolina & his fictional Trent was Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County and Southern Gothic literature is all the better for it. Some people scoffed at this book – claiming that Parker can’t carry a novel and he should stick to poetry and short stories; I disagree. While I do think the novel could have used a bit more tweaking, Parker is a master with words and with locations. Towns without Rivers is a satisfying read that somehow manages to make me both hate and miss my home.