Whiteman by Tony D'Souza
I went into Tony D'Souza's first novel, Whiteman , with bunches of biases: We had taken a marvelous story of his for Best American Fantasy , I have been following pretty closely his dispatches from Nicaragua about the Eric Volz case, and his editor is Tina Pohlman , for whom I have tremendous respect. The one negative bias I had toward the book is that (for various, complicated, contradictory reasons) I judge stories of middle-class white people in "exotic" settings more harshly than I do other sorts of stories. (And yet at the same time I am fascinated by such stories.) For me, then, Whiteman accomplished a lot -- soon enough, I was so thoroughly drawn in by its narrative voice and particular details that it became, in many ways, just another book for me, one on which none of my biases had any effect while reading. Whiteman is an episodic novel with a first-person narrator named Jack Diaz, who works for a relief agency called Potable Water International and liv...
