A certain soul-crushing scene from The Fountainhead makes its way into my brain about this time every year. Ayn Rand describes a summer traffic jam -- masses of people escaping the city in a lemming-like exodus to the beach, which in all its bourgeois insignificance might as well be a cliff for them to hurl themselves off of. It’s this grim take on a summer vacation that comes to mind when I’m stuck in a two-mile back-up on the Sagamore Bridge. (That and whether I remembered to pack the beer.)We all need to get away. But a vacation doesn’t have to mean an insufferable traffic jam, a transoceanic flight, or even getting a tan. The following four novels will transport you to places and lives far from those you know, unless of course you’re already an artist in Australia, an aid worker in West Africa, a documentary-film producer in Norway, or a war correspondent in the Sahara.
Henry Shukman’s Mortimer of the Maghreb (Knopf, 480 pages, $24) is an outstanding debut collection of stories that begins with the rise and fall of war reporter Charles Mortimer. An award-winning poet, travel writer, and trombonist, Shukman has created a character who is more openly flawed than Hemingway’s correspondents. But Shukman’s writing boasts a similar masculine vigor, albeit slightly more refined (he’s British, after all). Early on, he establishes Mortimer’s attraction to the desert: “Ahmoud moved slowly, with that desert economy born of unrelenting thirst. Mortimer liked that way of moving. It seemed more a way of being. Something in him loved a desert.”
Shukman’s descriptions are lyrical, passionate: “What an effect the simple press of humanity has in a desert town . . . people everywhere, so many of them . . . They create a sensation unknown in the West. The dust of multitudes drifting up as a haze into the unencumbered sky. The knowledge of the desert, the emptiness, all around. The desert forces a graphic understanding of the true human presence on the planet: a something, in a void.” The three stories that make up the second part of the book leave Mortimer and Africa behind for a businessman, an artist, and a stockbroker in the Caribbean. The setting turns out to be less idyllic than the desert: the sea “was a livid blue, with streaks of sickly green. But this morning it was more lurid than ever, as if a photographer had spilt the chemicals in the darkroom and come up with a grotesquerie of tropical colour.” The sensuality, vitality, and immediacy of Shukman’s writing land you in far corners of the world and keep you there, under a welcome weight.
More overtly sexual is Tony D’Souza’s debut novel Whiteman (Harcourt, 279 pages, $22) about an American relief worker stationed on the Ivory Coast. The book tracks Jack Diaz’s three years in Africa as he navigates village culture -- its proverbs, its genies, its customs -- and settles into its rhythms. D’Souza does well exploring the complications and contradictions of an outsider in Africa, where civil wars, hunger, and AIDS cast dark, wide shadows. Diaz is seduced by some of the African women (Djamilla “would have been beautiful anywhere”; “though AIDS was everywhere, inside Sabina it didn’t seem such a frightening thing; I ignored it, found it worth the risk”). But more so, he’s seduced by Africa itself: “I loved Africa, loved being in the fields with Bukari and his cattle, the tender hands he laid on their haunches. I loved the sound of the children singing at night, the long drape of the stars. I loved the forest and being in it. I loved it when it rained and the air was so clean it wasn’t like there was any air at all.”
