Bob Shacochis’s ‘Woman Who Lost Her Soul’ (original) (raw)
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The Unquiet Americans
- Sept. 20, 2013
Like most serious American novels about war, “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” wants to explain the country in its entirety. Of course, that’s a tall order, but Bob Shacochis doesn’t lack for ambition — his novel is about not one but two contemporary wars, both of them endless: the war on terror and the war on drugs. It’s a novel about the United States that takes place largely outside the United States, if you discount the many scenes set on various world-renowned American golf courses. Although the book strives to paint a full portrait of its panoply of complicated characters — both in warrior mode and on the home front — the problem with endless war in a narrative is that the writer ends up not with “War and Peace” but with war and . . . more war. One follows from battle to battle, from firefight to firefight, from political assassination to terror attack to revenge-taking, without resolution, because the endless war can conceive of no resolution: resolution, which makes a narrative complete, is not part of this story.
“The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” opens in the chaotic, corrupt landscape of Haiti in the 1990s, an unpredictable place more or less run (as it still is, in part) by U.N. peacekeepers. This is a country Shacochis knows well; he covered America’s 1994 intervention and occupation and wrote about it in his intelligent nonfiction book “The Immaculate Invasion,” which showed real sensitivity and sympathy to soldiers, as well as an understanding of how Haiti works and doesn’t work. Those qualities serve him again in “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul.”
As usual in Western novels set there, Haiti provides Shacochis with a torrid, primitive, dangerous backdrop for the shenanigans of white people. Many arrangements in the book are made on the terrace of the Hotel Oloffson, Port-au-Prince’s infamous ramshackle expat enclave. Love affairs begin in upscale restaurants. Other things happen (including sex between outsiders) at nighttime Vodou ceremonies.
The human-rights lawyer Tom Harrington seems to be the book’s hero during the first section. At a swank restaurant uptown, hanging out with an American movie director who wants to interview the rebels to the north, Harrington meets the woman of the title, who could be the identical twin of the “pixie-ish Hollywood actress who starred in romantic comedies . . . one of Harrington’s favorites, the standard-bearer for every Sally-next-door heartthrob fantasy the studios could confect.” This glamorous, soulless beauty turns out to be Jackie Scott. Jackie is “a remote angel” with “golden” hair and blue eyes, in her mid-20s, and ostensibly a photographer with a degree in ethnobotany. As the novel progresses, the golden-haired Jackie, under one of her many aliases, is often naked or topless, wears boyfriend boxers that sit low on her slender hips, and looks great even when wounded, even when vomiting or drunk, even when in withdrawal from drugs. It turns out she’s not just an ethnobotanist. She is also the daughter of the man who, for all intents and purposes, runs the world.
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Credit...Carole Hénaff
This woman who lost her soul is a male fantasy, an object of male regard, and, unlike the novel’s big male characters, she is seen from within only while she’s a teenager and on a few other discrete occasions. You’d imagine the novel could not help foundering on the shoals of this gilded, pornographic creature — yet the world Shacochis presents is believable enough and important enough to allow the book to sail on over the annoyance of the fantastical siren at its heart. I cannot reveal the strange contortions Jackie goes through or the levels of being and nothingness she experiences without spoiling some of the book’s many denouements. But suffice it to say that as you become more enmeshed in this paranoid and persuasive presentation of the world we live in, Jackie (or Dottie, or Renee) becomes slowly more human, less a goddess, in spite of her almost mythic travails.
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