Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The novel is epic enough in scope to require a character list and several pages of maps, but the pages fly as the reader is compelled to figure out how all the narratives will eventually collide.ĭrawing from genres as diverse as horror, humor, and historical fiction, Kupersmith creates a rich and dazzling spectacle.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.
Any description of the book could make it sound like too many spinning plates, but Kupersmith manages the whirl with dexterity and confidence. The novel also dips into Vietnam’s pre- and post-colonial history with French characters to explore the ways in which war creates another kind of hauntedness. There’s the team at Saigon Spirit Eradication, a kind of Vietnamese Ghostbusters, only the head of the organization, known as the Fortune Teller, is not what he appears to be. Kupersmith, herself of Vietnamese heritage, interweaves Winnie’s life in Vietnam with other people's stories, all linked together by a supernatural bond: There’s the daughter of a prominent pepper company owner, who disappeared into the forest a generation before Winnie and was rescued under mysterious circumstances. But Winnie is finally settling into life in Saigon with her boyfriend, Long, when she suddenly goes missing. Winnie feels herself to be unexceptional in every way: Half White American, half Vietnamese, she sees herself as having “the muddy ambiguity of the middle.” (In a "taupe” bathroom stall, she gloomily wonders if she is blending into the walls.) She’s also a frankly terrible English teacher, and she lives in fear of being found out by her zealous expat colleagues.
Winnie is just 22 when she moves in with her great aunt and two surly cousins in Saigon to teach English at the Achievement! International Language Academy. A wide-ranging first novel that peels back the layers of a haunted Vietnam.
0 kommentar(er)
