From Publishers Weekly
Like her acclaimed 1998 debut, The Undiscovered Country, Gillison's second novel is set in New Guinea (where she lived in the early 1970s) and revolves around an introspective only child of bitterly estranged parents. Stephen Hesse-loosely modeled on Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared 40 years ago in then Dutch New Guinea while collecting primitive art for his father's collectionâ€"is an excruciatingly lonely, earnest kid struggling to develop an identity under the crushing weight of his father's millions. Gillison skips nimbly through time and space to create a moving portrait of an intellectual, enthusiastic young man who's finding that all his glittering Hesse gold (there's so much of it that even the author sometimes seems to be in its thrall) is as much a curse as a blessing. Aspiring anthropologist Stephen eventually finagles his way onto a Harvard research team bound for New Guinea, and both he and the novel spring fully to life with the advent of dense, teeming coastlines and vertiginous mountain interiors. When compared to the richness of New Guinea's unbridled nature and awesome tribal art, Stephen's previous life feels flat and lifeless. His boredom as a young man in the U.S. occasionally infects the writing itself, but Gillison redeems herself in the jungle: in her loving hands, the lush landscapes throb with color and intensity. By the time Stephen finally disappears, as the reader knows he will, on an ill-advised art-buying mission among head-hunting tribes, one can't help mourning the loss of whatever this awakening might have spurred him to become.
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Gillison is a quietly commanding writer who has some extremely provocative and important things to say about wealth, indigenous cultures, and the domination of Western civilization. These concerns fueled her impressive debut,
The Undiscovered Country (1998), and underlie this psychologically and culturally astute fictionalization of the sad fate of Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared in 1961 off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where he was collecting native art. Gillison's evocation of place is sensual and penetrating, and her imagining of the heart and mind of her hero, Stephen Hesse, is masterful. The eldest son of a man so rich and powerful he is America's virtual king, and the only child of the big man's rejected first wife, Stephen is materially rich, emotionally impoverished, and at perpetual loose ends. Athletic, artistic, and solitary, he seeks love with an older woman who feels nothing for him and spiritual revelation in a dangerous and distant land. Even in the wilds of New Guinea his pseudoroyalty condemns him to the bleak loneliness reserved for those who are resented by all. Gillison's supremely riveting story explores the jungle of the psyche, cultural collisions, and the "dark curse" of an unholy inheritance.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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