Sunday, February 28, 2010

By Reviewed by Rosalind Brackenbury

"Lying With the Dead"

Other Press $14.95

"Between Terror

and Tourism"

Counterpoint $16.95

both by Michael Mewshaw

Some novelists claim that their lives are uninteresting because all they do is sit in a room and write. This cannot be said of Michael Mewshaw, although he obviously does some of that too. The business of the writer's life seems to have been defined for him early in his twenties, when instead of going for an MFA he set off to visit well-known writers and find out at first hand what the writer's life looked like.

Go out there and do stuff seems to have been his motto all along. Even if elderly famous writers try to seduce your wife, even if you run out of money, break down in your little car and have to juggle life as you go, go out there and do it.

Many books and years later, he's still out there doing stuff. In one year, two very different books have come out of it. The novel, "Lying with the Dead," charts the inner life of a family that could well be called dysfunctional (if we ever really knew what functional was) and could veer towards the gothic if the writer had not kept his lightness of touch throughout, so that you are moved but not appalled. Briefly, three middle-aged kids are summoned home by their crazy mom and one of them is going to be invited to kill her. Mewshaw's patient tracking of people's innermost secrets, fears and hopes and his realization that bad things do happen -- and often people find ways of accepting them -- make for a complex set of characters and a story that's more subtle than shocking. The format is not new (the three protagonists take turns to narrate) but fits the topic well as the story is passed from hand to hand and, as in all families, each one's views and theories don't match the others.' Just when the going gets rough, you are briskly brought to the next person's point of view and your own view of the truth is challenged.

The going gets rough, for sure, in Mewshaw's second book, "Between Terror and Tourism," released this February. Here he's not charting the delicate inter-reactions of family but the hard roads and tracks of North Africa. On turning 65, instead of putting his feet up or writing about the limitations of aging, he set off to take a 4,000-mile journey overland from Egypt through Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Someone suggested he take a gun but he refused. Many people told him about the recent executions of Americans in some of these countries, notably Algeria, but he decided to believe he looked like a Berber grandfather, with his white hair and mustache, and went anyway. The only family business occurred when his wife Linda and their son Marc staged an intervention and showed up from Key West, begging him not to go into Algeria. He went anyway.

Some travel writers pretend they are alone when they are not and have done things more heroically than in reality; it's very tempting to pull a Bruce Chatwin and imitate his stoical lonely stance, or to do a Paul Theroux and grumble all the way, as if nobody ever helped you. Mewshaw is honest in giving due to drivers, like Khalil, his guide in Libya, for their help. He also admits to fatigue, loneliness, homesickness and the longing for a drink; every now and then he is terrified, but we don't as readers really worry for him as he seems to carry a survivor's luck with him. This may be because the "I" in such a memoir can't end up with his head cut off. But I think it's more to do with his novelist's sense of adventure -- this may be hell, but it's sure going to make for good writing. His novelist's eye is frequently fascinated by something going on off-center, a detail that detracts from the moment's immediate threat. (Novelists worry less about what's about to happen, perhaps because what is immediate is so interesting. A conjecture, anyway.)

"Between Terror and Tourism" does what it announces. It finds a way between two clichés of our contemporary world. There is a place, he tells us, between the exploitation of tourism, the gated vacation spots, the luxury hotels, and the nightmare of cells, kidnapping and summary execution that the word terror now evokes. What's more, we can go there and find that people live there, humans like ourselves. There's a wealth of history in this book, a knowledge of the area that dispels the American idea that this is all "the mid-east" or that all North African, Arabic-speaking countries are the same. He evokes his and Linda's earlier travels in the 1960s and notes what has happened in between. He mourns the loss of unspoiled coasts and quiet villages. He is blunt about the fact that, if we all knew how brutally the colonial powers, e.g. the Italians in Libya, the French in Algeria, treated these countries' inhabitants in the 20th century, we would understand that "terror" cannot be stopped by bombs in the 21st, springing as it does from poverty, despair and rage.

I'm glad that Mike Mewshaw came home to tell the tale. We should pay attention, we who don't do such things ourselves. This is an important book, if you care about reality supplanting fantasy and do not want to live off received ideas about the countries of the Arab world.

Michael Mewshaw reads from his work at the Friends of the Library lecture series at the county library on Fleming St., Monday, March 1, at 6 p.m.