|
 |
 |
||||
 |
|
|
 |
||
|
Buy |
|
|
|||
| The Shortest Way Home by Elaine Reidy (Dominican Republic 1963–65) AuthorHouse September 2004 369 pages $19.95 |
|
||||
|
|
 |
|||
|
|||||
|
Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65) | ||||
|
|||||
|
|
OH, HOW THIS BOOK TOOK ME BACK! Elaine Reidy’s The Shortest Way Home is a bildungsroman, the tale of a young, working class Irish American girl who joins the Peace Corps in 1963, straight out of her hometown of Trowbridge, Massachusetts. When we meet her she’s tough, enterprising, and idealistic. Lina, short for Colleen, files her application on her own, without letting her parents in on her plans. When she’s accepted by the Peace Corps, her parents are horrified and try to stop her, but she will have none of it. We follow her through training in a camp in Palmar (which sounds suspiciously like the place I trained in, in the mountains above Arecibo, Puerto Rico). Esmeralda, where Lina is sent, is clearly the Domincan Republic of Elaine Reidy’s own service. Through her we witness that first encounter with the urban poor, their wretched living conditions, the illnesses that run rampant in the barrios, the rats, the hunger, and the astonishing generosity the Esmeraldans show to any visitor in their homes. With Lina we rail against the shocking unconsciousness of the rich and the obtuseness of American government officials, including the hierarchy of the early Peace Corps. Lina, who seems to live on cigarettes and Coca Cola, emerges as a sexually puritanical, hard-working, dedicated, sassy young woman with a head of ever-wilder red hair, a pair of large breasts on an increasingly skinny frame, and innate talents for crooning ballads and winning at cards. One of the best scenes in this book is a game of gin rummy between Lina and Dieudonné, a Haitian journalist and voodoo practitioner, during which Reidy skillfully writes a duel of power and vulnerability at the card table. At one point Dieudonné says,
It’s the stuff of a Graham Greene novel, but I’m sorry to say that most of the book doesn’t come up to the level of the writing in this scene. Nonetheless, The Shortest Way Home is a valuable piece of literature, particularly for those interested in the early days of the Peace Corps. It describes and evokes the mid-1960s experiences of Volunteers in Latin American countries with a specificity I haven’t found elsewhere. |
||||
|
|||||
|
|
Marnie Mueller’s Peace Corps novel, Green Fires, was the winner of the Maria Thomas Award for Outstanding Fiction and an American Book Award. The Climate of the Country, her second novel, is set in Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp where she was born. Her most recent novel, My Mother’s Island, was a BookSense 76 Selection.
|
|
|||
|
|
||||
|
||||||||||||