PETER ORNER

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, April 23, 2006:
As Thomas Pynchon made clear in his first novel, "V.," any writer who wants to criticize colonialism should look into some Namibian real estate. Nearly empty of people, nearly empty of recorded history except for the German slaughter of the Herero tribe in 1904, which Pynchon depicts as a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust, the arid African nation is an ideal, uncluttered backdrop for allegories about oppression.

Peter Orner makes the symbolism boldface in his own memorable first novel, which is set at a remote Catholic school in Namibia and based on the author's own year teaching in the veld. The author's stand-in, Larry Kaplanski, whiles away his after-class siestas trysting with an African freedom fighter atop the stone tombs of three Boer settlers. Every chapter in which white man and black woman have sex has the same portentous title--"Graves"--and their bed itself lies close to the spot where the Hereros and Germans battled.

Yet this young sahib is not pure archetype, nor is he burdened by many paternalistic illusions.

Orner's thrift only heightens the longing that vibrates throughout the novel. He has written a starvation diary about desire, with as much sexual tension as a bodice-buster. The deprivation gets so extreme that Orner plays it for laughs. The men of Goas stew in their desert monastery cells, transfixed by lust, searching for redemption in risqué beer ads from ancient magazines, abject in the rare presence of flesh-and-blood females. The outline of a breast through a rain-soaked T-shirt becomes a sacred vision and the day it occurred holy, forever remembered as "The Deluge of Dikeledi." And evidence that other living things might actually be getting lucky is torture, be they "bedraggled pigeons" or old married folk.

When a young woman named Mavala Shikongo wanders onto this barren stage set, she's doomed to look like salvation. Larry is impelled toward her helplessly: she, meanwhile, decides he'll do. The reader knows how their romance will end before they touch, as Orner hints in the fate of a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. "The hopeful ones... drowsy from unrequited aching... they were simple to kill." But they do touch, and try to connect; Mavala begins the affair by laying her head on Larry's stomach. The gesture seems almost lurid after half a book of drought. Then, lest the physical facts disappoint, the narrative turns chaste. We have only flashes of what transpires between the lovers: a clenched fist, a birthmark below Mavala's breast. Their conversations are what Orner wants to share, and words fail them. They cannot bridge the divide. "You think I don't know I'm on vacation?" Larry snaps. "This," Mavala says, "is nothing." Their connection was a mirage. Mavala disappears from Goas; Larry returns to Ohio.

Ultimately what endures is his simple bond with the other male inmates, as Orner shows with a typically frugal postscript. Ten years after his Namibian vacation, he gets a letter. "Your letters have not gone unread," says a fellow teacher. "We've heard you, is what I'm trying to say." Larry has never stopped reaching out, and this time someone has reached back.