Protest literature

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, February 6, 2000

Scar Vegas: And Other Stories
By TOM PAINE

Reviewed by STACEY D'ERASMO

Politically engaged fiction, in this country anyway, is a bit of a rare
bird these days. Protest art doesn't thrive, somehow, in a bull market.
This is perhaps why -- beyond the author's name -- Tom Paine's short
fiction has an anachronistic feel. He dedicates his first short-story
collection, ''Scar Vegas,'' to the Nigerian writer and activist Ken
Saro-Wiwa, who was ''hanged for our insatiable oil gluttony.'' Every story
concerns itself with the ways in which huge geopolitical forces change the
texture of small individual lives: the way Operation Desert Storm haunts
one former soldier's dreams, for example, or how neocolonialism and
development on a Caribbean island keep one shy man from courting the love
of his life.

Paine tends to focus not on the fat and powerful but on the ordinary faces
in the crowd. Stories begin: ''I was a clean-cut Burlington boy who joined
the Marines to get money for college''; ''We had stumbled out of a monsoon
into the Rangoon bar earlier that evening. Most of us were American and
British engineers''; ''Like a lot of this takes place before me and
Nosebone got out there to the Anarchist Convention in Portland in the
summer of 1996''; and, in the soft, sad voice of a Romanian refugee, ''I
will tell you about my twin brother Pavel.'' Paine picks out the tired
soldiers, the lonely cowboys, the guys who can't get a break. The esteemed
general he writes about, in ''General Markman's Last Stand,'' is also a
secret cross-dresser who is discovered stealing a bra from the PX. The smug
Princeton grad out sailing in his yawl named Bliss is promptly shipwrecked
and then deposited on the floor of a makeshift boat crowded with Haitian
refugees. Paine is highly aware of the price of every class, race and sex
ticket; in nearly every story, somebody pays it.

This is refreshing, and brave. Paine is a wonderful yarn-spinner, a skill
that suits and enhances his geopolitical engagement. These are adventure
stories, full of distant locales, myriad plot twists and details of foreign
customs. Paine has clearly read his Conrad and his Hemingway, but also his
J. D. Salinger. A broken-down cowboy and his friend slump drunkenly against
the wall of a seedy Vegas hotel, looking, the cowboy says, as if ''we were
gunned down.'' A teenage anarchist pulls into the parking lot of a Kmart
and finds that ''like all my bliss went out the window.'' Running through
many of the stories, along with the critique of global capitalism and
racism, is a sadness about masculinity. The soldiers, the sailors, the
engineers, the cowboys and the football players who populate Paine's
universe give off the distinct, disappointed air of men who have been sold
a bill of goods: Desert Storm poisons your children; building big hotels in
Bali makes the lush grasses that were once there only a memory; chugging
cases of beer is not, in the event, that great.

But if there is a profoundly populist vision at work here, there is also,
sometimes, an oratorical, populist distance. Like voices from beyond the
grave, the characters' sorrow often has an attenuated, slightly disembodied
quality. You can hear them crying without quite being able to see or touch
them; some of the first-person narrators are not even given names --
they're guys in a bar, marines in a platoon, telling stories, sometimes
second- or thirdhand. While this increases the sense of the collective, it
also has a tendency to make individual faces go fuzzy, as if humanity were
not composed of specific, idiosyncratic people. Indeed, characters
sometimes remark that they feel like ghosts. The Romanian refugee says he
has such a strong ''personal sense of invisibility'' that he hates looking
in the mirror; another character is said to be ''no more present'' than a
dog; another, stripped of money, finds that people look through her ''as if
she were a ghost.'' For Paine's protagonists, disappearing altogether is a
constant threat; they fear they are not, by themselves, quite substantial
enough.

Paine also has a sneaking fondness for narrative as a weapon of social
justice that can result in every privilege exacting its weight in a
corresponding soul sickness and every rebel being depicted as heroic. This
proclivity weakens stories like ''A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the
Stock Market First Breaking 6,000,'' in which a greedy, blond,
pearl-wearing stockbroker gets her comeuppance and then some in a Texas
border town, or ''The Battle of Khafji,'' which transforms a renegade
marine into a Christ figure, washing the bloody feet of Iraqi prisoners.

Still, Paine's is a sad and beautiful world. Details, counsel teachers of
writing, details, details. Paine, singularly among his peers, never loses
sight of the fact that some details -- of suffering, exile and the uses of
power -- are more important than others.

(Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novel ''Tea.'' )


Louis Proyect
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