Leonard Gill, Editor
The Ordinary Seaman, By Francisco Goldman, Atlantic Monthly Press, 381 pp., $23
n November 1982,
an item inside the New York Daily News reported on a derelict ship
docked in Brooklyn and the men housed there. "The sailors had been
lured here from Central America with the promise of good wages," the
story read, "but instead found themselves abandoned, unpaid and trapped...."
With no plumbing, no electricity, and no heat, the rat-infested vessel was
dubbed a "ship of horrors," but one that its non-English-speaking
-- and illegal -- immigrants were too afraid and too ill-equipped to leave.
A relief organization discovered the crew and the deplorable conditions
on board; the ship's owner could not be traced.
What
in 1982 was a minor news item has in Francisco Goldman's hands been turned
into The Ordinary Seaman, an extraordinary new novel with "major"
written all over it: major themes on a major scale by a writer one would
like to believe has earned, because he deserves, major status.
Goldman sets his story in 1989 and immediately focuses on 19-year-old Esteban Gaitán, a veteran Sandinista guerilla fighter who's due to join 14 other Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans on the Urus, a cargo ship registered under a Panamanian flag of convenience and temporarily docked in a Brooklyn shipyard. The crew is expecting a year-long stint at sea and the handsome pay that goes with it. What they don't expect -- or expect to endure for six grueling months -- is the complete absence of all they'd been promised: The Urus, without a generator, water, or heat, is closer to being scrap than it is to being seaworthy; wages, at $1.33 an hour tops for a 60-hour workweek, never materialize; provisions and accommodations are woefully inadequate if not downright hazardous to the lives on board; and the boat, as broken as its capitán's assurances, never sails.
That capitán, Elias Tureen, a self-deluded adventurer, philanderer, and basic good-for-nothing, didn't plan for this to happen, but reconstituting a ship by exploiting some cheap Third World labor sounded like a great, if risky, idea when he purchased the boat (using a friend's inheritance) and had it towed down from Newfoundland. (True greatness always does involve risk, Elias muses, but he never questions who the ultimate risk-takers were here.) Success was only a matter of finding the right buyer in time -- a buyer to take over the mounting debt and the unsuspecting crew.
This is but an outline to the grimness in The Ordinary Seaman's harrowing description of life on board the Urus. What the book offers in the way of temporary relief lies in its cross-section of cultures, settings, languages -- your high-school Spanish will come in handy here -- and above all, characters: Bernardo, the crew's aged cook, who dies an unnecessary and particularly cruel death in a Manhattan hospital; John, the Ship Visitor, who arrives, almost miraculously, to intervene on the crew's behalf; John's girlfriend, Ariadne, who admires his commitment but won't shake her Eurotrash friends; Mark, Elias' whipping boy, who flees the country and all responsibility for the sailors' welfare; and Joaquina, who enters the novel as a Latin spitfire but who softens into as hard-bitten an angel as you are likely to find.
But it is Esteban who chiefly steers us outside the ship's confines, whether it be via memories of his revolutionary past and the woman he loved, or his nightly forays into Brooklyn for possible food, freedom, and hope. What he finds on shore, in ascending order of need -- and so palpably but eloquently rendered in The Ordinary Seaman -- is something of all three. -- Leonard Gill
Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love, By Merrill Markoe, Atlantic Monthly Press, 177 pp., $21
HUMORIST MERRILL MARKOE ADmits she's the last person you'd want to seek out for love advice, so what's she doing writing a whole book on the subject, and one as presumptuously titled as Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love?
It's a trick question because, for the most part, this is not a guide to love but a guide to guides to love. Fancying herself a sort of contemporary Margaret Mead, Markoe endured countless seminars, waded through sundry how-to books, and logged several hours of observation to discover the path to the lauded promised land of love. The results, she finds, involve a disturbingly high number of serious geeks and prosthetic private parts.
Lured to seminars with titles like "How to Make a Man into Putty in Your Hands" and "Prepare to FIND (and Marry!) Your PERFECT MATE in Six Months," Markoe quickly learns to rate them on how many companion products the event's inevitably super-perky host has for sale. As the number of workbooks drops, so too does the quality of the seminar. At the "Putty" event's Sophisticates' Sexuality Seminar, she's handed a box filled with multicolored and multisized dildos and told to pick one and place it on a china plate. "After all," she notes, "this is the Sophisticates' Sexuality Seminar, and we sophisticates prefer a simple china pattern." At another seminar, she's tapped on the shoulder and turns to find a Robert Shapiro lookalike trying to hand her a plastic, squirting vagina.
Things turn from surreal to ugly when Markoe meets her Love Channeler, a middle-aged man named Edward who wears a Snoopy T-shirt and lives in an apartment crammed with stuffed animals. Markoe is advised that in order to call forth her guide Shontee, Edward must touch her heart chakra -- or, in other words, put his hand down her shirt. Then, Edward and Shontee have a dispute over Markoe's state, ending with Shontee accusing Edward of becoming too close to his subject.
Markoe's humor is very dry -- more clever than funny -- so this book is not for everyone. Markoe used to write for TV, most notably Late Night with David Letterman (Letterman is an old beau and perhaps the person behind her chapter "Tips on Dating a Crazy Person"). That background is extremely evident in her writing style. She sets up the situation, and then -- you can almost hear the drumbeat -- delivers the punchline. Introduced to a lubricant that heats up, for example, she wonders, "Heat in the genital area? Hmm. All the sensuous feeling of a urinary tract infection." Ah, the glories of love. -- Susan Ellis
LAWRENCE WAYNE IS AIMING high. Wayne, director of the first annual Black Memphis Writers Conference, says he hopes the event will be the literary equivalent of the Southern Heritage Classic. The conference, which will be held April 4th and 5th, will feature book signings, poetry readings, a children's story time, and more. Among those who will be on hand are children's librarian and Willie Jerome author Alice Faye Duncan, University of Memphis professor and author Dr. Reginald Martin, and poet Markhum Who? Another draw is the workshops covering such subjects as the ethnic romance novel and debunking the Bell Curve. A kick-off reception will be held on Friday from noon to 2 p.m. The Black Memphis Writers Conference will be held at the April House, located at 1320 E. Lamar. Admission to the conference is free; workshops cost $15. Call 795-7309 for more information.
Also on April 4th and 5th is the River City Romance Writers' fifth annual Duel on the Delta Writers' Conference. The goal of this event is to stir those smoldering passions deep within you and translate them into a novel that thousands of women can sigh over. Featured speaker of this year's banquet will be Mary Jo Putney, prolific author and six-time winner of the Romance Writers of America Golden Choice Award. In addition to workshops and a luncheon, there will be experienced writers, noted publishing-house editors, and agents on hand as well as a special "Night Owl" roundtable, which will give participants a chance to have up-close-and-personal discussions with local published romance novelists. Duel on the Delta is being held at the Adams Mark Hotel. Registration is $115. For more information, call 854-1102.