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By Woodrow J. Hinton
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Tom LeClair
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In September upstart publisher Olin Frederick will issue Well-Founded Fear, the new novel from literary critic and University of Cincinnati English professor Tom LeClair.
The novel concerns Casey Mahan, an idealistic, 33-year- old Cincinnati lawyer, whose commitment to human rights and desire to get far enough away from Cincinnati to "miss Skyline Chili and the ATP tennis tournament" take her to Athens, Greece, where she begins a job interviewing Kurdish applicants for refugee status at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Events take a sinister turn, however, when a refugee Casey approved sets out on a random, one-man reign of terror to poison America's water supplies. Despite Casey's good intentions, she too has become a refugee of sorts. And her complicity in this terrorist threat to America leads her to experience her applicants' "well-founded fear" of persecution.
The novel takes place in the early 1990s during Turkey's 15-year-war on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish revolutionary group, who hoped -- and still hope -- to set up an independent Kurdish state. Despite the human rights abuses in the conflict, the plight of the Kurds has been a sort of non-event as far as American news media is concerned. But, as LeClair suggests during a recent lunchtime interview, the Kurds have on occasion been newsworthy, but only when their predicament furthers American foreign policy goals.
"Here you get Kurdish news when it suits our propaganda purposes, 'Oh, the Kurds were gassed. Let's do something to Saddam' or 'The Kurds were forced out of Northern Iraq,' " he says. "(The Kurds) are politically instruments of U.S. policy frequently and of the media, as well. When it suits, we pay attention to the Kurds."
As with the novel's main character, Casey Mahan, people who become refugees are often people caught in the middle of a struggle between powerful forces. And similarly the Kurds are victims of not only Turkey or Iraq, but of their own revolutionary movement. I ask LeClair for his views on the PKK, whether he sees them as a terrorist group or as a genuine democratic revolutionary movement.
"It's not democratic," he replies. "It is or was a revolutionary movement. Yassir Arafat was a terrorist for two decades. Now he's a head of state. Terrorists tend to turn into dignitaries if they're successful. But, instead, (PKK leader) Abdullah Ocalan is on an island prison off the coast of Turkey waiting to be executed. The PKK uses terror. They terrorize not just the Turkish military or Turkish citizens: They terrorize Kurdish villagers who support the government.
"There are a lot of atrocities on both sides, no doubt about it. But (the PKK's) been about the only force that keeps Kurds alive in Turkey, because Turkey has denied so many rights: of representation or newspapers or broadcasting. Really Turkey brought this upon themselves, this kind of organization."
LeClair's interest in the Kurds developed after spending several summers in Athens, Greece, a city which the novelist describes as "world central" for refugees, including, of course, many Kurds.
"Once I started investigating, I found out that the Kurds were sort of like refugees' refugees," he says. "They had never had a homeland, and they're spread out through the country. They don't have a country. The Palestinians do now. Israel does now. But the Kurds are a wandering, nomadic people. So they seemed to me not just to be interesting in themselves, but to stand for all refugees, the worst that you could have, because they didn't even have a place to flee from."
In Greece, LeClair visited refugee camps and sat in on UNHCR interviews, providing him the background to re-create Well-Founded Fear's detailed UNHCR refugee sessions. He also saw terrorism up close, which, not coincidentally, is a component of both of his published novels.
"My first novel (Passing Off) was about what appears to be an attempt to blow up the Taj Mahal. The second one is about terrorism. Some people who have read both have asked 'Why is it that you're so interested in terrorism?' And to some extent, I'm not as interested as those books would imply. So there is a kind of false assumption of that. But, as I said, I spend a good bit of time in Greece, and once my wife and I were out for a walk and saw a small crowd gathered. We walked over to see what it was. It could have been a busker. It could have been a break dancer.
Well, instead of either of those, it was a car with the doors open and a driver lying dead in the driver's seat and the police had just taken away the publisher of a very prominent Athens daily. This was within a two-minute walk from my home. The event occurred within, say, five or 10 minutes of my walking on that street. I'd seen it pretty close up, so I think that's one of the reasons why I have come back to it."
Terror and international intrigue are readily apparent with a surface reading of Well-Founded Fear -- LeClair himself describes the book as an amalgam of a documentary and a legal thriller -- but beneath the novel's surface lurk themes concerning the failure of narrative, the failure of language and the failure of communication.
"Most of the applicants have a half-an-hour," LeClair says, describing the refugee's applications for asylum. "They get to write their narrative. They answer the questions on the questionnaire. Oftentimes those narratives are written by other people, so when they get their half-hour in the interview, the time is spent going over the written interview to see if the interviewer can poke holes in it.
"But I do think the book is about the limitation of narrative, particularly of short narratives, the kind you get to give in a half-an-hour. They lie. A lot of the applicants' lives depend on the stories they tell. Mine doesn't. I've got a day job. Most writers' lives don't depend on the stories they tell, not like the applicants themselves. (It's about) the failure of language, the failure of narrative, and the need sometimes for them to make up fictions, just because if they told the exact truth they might not get asylum. But a slight twist on the truth would get them asylum. And maybe they're just as deserving. I guess another way to say it is that some people are forced to lie by the form or structure of the interview process."
The unreliability of language and of narrative poses an interesting problem for the readers of Well-Founded Fear. The novel itself takes the form of Casey's refugee narrative. It is a collection of documents: questionnaires, letters, interviews, transcriptions of tape-recorded thoughts and government documents. And it's quite possible that some of these documents are bogus. Motivated as she is by guilt, love and fear, Casey's document is as suspect as that of any Kurdish refugee. And by the end of the novel some readers may find that their confidence in the narrator has been shaken.
As LeClair himself predicts, some readers' expectations may not be met by the end of the novel. And admittedly, despite being billed as a thriller, it's not the type of book you're likely to find in an embossed trade edition on aisle 4 of Kroger next to the latest Dean Koontz. But what the book lacks in supermarket thrills, it more than makes up for with interesting plot twists and genuine surprises. Plus it's compassionate theme of human rights and its distinction as being the first English-language novel about the Kurds make the book well-worth reading on these merits alone.
The time between the publication of LeClair's first book and Well-Founded Fear has been about 4 years, but it looks like the next decade should bring something of a boom in the publication of LeClair novels.
His next book, The Liquidators, is already scheduled for publication next year through Olin Frederick. LeClair describes the novel with a hint of mirth as "both a sequel and a retelling of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom -- in 140 pages.
"It's about a cross-country liquidator who loads this stuff that nobody else can sell into his trailer trucks and drives around from city to city trying to get rid of the waste products of America," he explains.
The Liquidators' oddball premise should remove any misconceptions about LeClair being obsessed with terrorist novels and, like Well-Founded Fear, it should bring more attention to one of Cincinnati's most literary and challenging authors.
WELLFOUNDED FEAR, Tom LeClair's latest novel, will be available in bookstores on Sept. 5.
