Observation Room

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

The notion that fiction can work as a tool for learning about other things has always been a mainstay for English teachers — they probably didn't need last month's London School of Economics study to make the case that a novel can do more than an academic report to convey hard research. Still, alongside the benefit of entertaining with plot and character and providing a window into other places and experiences comes the challenge of imparting new foreign information without writing like, well, some academic report.

This must be one reason certain stories rely on inexperienced, naïve central characters. Especially in adventure stories — spy novels and thrillers, genre workouts and pulp — where immediacy and speed are so necessary, a newbie hero can be a great friend. Just like an eager reader, the rookie cop will need the streets explained to him and the novice spy must be schooled in dead drops.

Jon Fasman does an especially clean, classic job of this in The Unpossessed City (Penguin, Oct. 30). Jim, Fasman's Russian-descended American hero, has only the bare minimum of qualifications to function in Fasman's medical-experiment espionage plot: a good heart and a functional knowledge of the Russian language. But he's quick and game and a good observer of Russian culture, and after a one-night stand with a troubled blonde, he's a smart and engaging focus for Fasman's entertainment. Fasman sketches out a world around Jim that plays to a detached observer's strengths — Jim navigates the conflicts between intelligence agencies and among post-Soviet ethnicities, and his romp sheds a little light on the culture that serves as its backdrop, mostly without losing sight of its status as a romp.

Bad Traffic's Inspector Jian, stranded in Leeds looking for a lost daughter, plies the other side of the cultural exchange (Scribner, Dec. 9). He's the creation of Simon Lewis, a Brit and a Far East Rough Guide writer, who one expects has some similarities to Jim himself. But his second novel turns his expat travel-writer's gaze on home, setting the odd couple of non-English-speaking Jian and timorous peasant Ding Ming to grope their way through alien northern England. With the brief addition of second-generation Chinese counter girl Joy halfway through the book, Lewis gives a by-the-numbers revenge tale some much-needed depth by filtering his plot through three distinct immigrant perspectives.

The mechanics of an outsider's narration get less obvious outside of pulp; when a writer worries less about velocity, he can follow a more natural exposition. But even in a book that trades on credibility as an insider's view of a city's underbelly, Alex Wheatle's

The Dirty South (Serpents Tail, Dec. 1) adopts similar strategies. Wheatle differs from "urban" writers like Nikki Turner mostly in that his Dirty South is Brixton, not Atlanta — his hero, Dennis, still moves from knocking over sweets shops as a child to moving product and slinging lead as a young man. This being Britain, the product is weed and the guns are harder to get, but the Horatio Alger picture of a boy coming up from the streets, painted with broad moral strokes,doesn't change. This predictability makes Dennis less gangster and more tour guide, looking to shock a reader into conceding his legitimacy.

Wheatle's impulse to go for the quick reaction undermines his story; far better he take the example of David Rhodes, whose serene Driftless (Milkweed Editions, Sept. 1) portrays a culture and a community in fine-grained detail beautifully and slowly. He sticks with descriptions and themes until they're polished to high gloss. Driftless concerns itself with up-country Wisconsin, trackless dairy farms and one-light towns, and dallies through a handful of plots all less important than the single quiet character who loosely connects them. Rhodes' success becomes the opposite of Fasman's, who creates excitement out of exposition. After most of the country has heard months of empty rhetoric about mythic small-town values, Rhodes consciously avoids drama to deliver a portrait of a real rural America as singular, beautiful and foreign as anywhere else. 

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)