SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Fiction Chronicle
By JAN STUART
Published: March 31, 2011
NUDE WALKER
By Bathsheba Monk.
306 pp. Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
Dodging I.E.D.’s in Afghanistan might seem a logical, if not
inevitable, destiny for the alienated youth of Warrenside, Pa., a moribund
steel town where crack dealers and strip clubs beckon the unemployed, everyone
owns a hunting rifle and junior warriors dress “in Kmart camouflage.” For Kat
Warren-Bineki and Max Asad, the ill-fated lovers and Afghan war veterans in
Monk’s mordant novel, an added incentive is the chance to escape their
oppressive families. Kat returns to an embezzler dad and an unhinged mom with a
penchant for parading naked in public. Max awaits a dreaded arranged marriage
and a future managing the empire of his Lebanese father, an erstwhile scholar
whose devotion to humanism has been replaced by a drive to amass a real estate
empire. Virtually everyone in Monk’s precision-choreographed subversion of
American myths is looking to swap the cards they’ve been dealt, most notably
the local country club’s neighbor, Wind Storm, a self-styled Indian “Love
Shaman” who has thrown off the Scandinavian half of her Swedish-Lenape heritage
in favor of an earth-motherly identity, hunting and gathering stray golf balls
in the woods.
"Nude Walker" combines a kaleidoscope of views of post-war life
By Rege Behe, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Bathsheba Monk
Paul Fuhrman
Capsule review
"Nude Walker" is a testimony to author
Bathsheba Monk's ability to balance multiple storylines and points of view. Her
writing is nimble, dexterous; her biting wit and sharp observations energize
what could have been a trite story about another American small town on the
brink of extinction.
— Rege Behe
About the writer
Rege Behe is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review staff
writer and can be reached at 412-320-7990 or via e-mail.
Larry Bird has long inspired basketball players.
But the former Boston Celtics great as a literary influence? Chances are,
highlight reels of Bird's deft passes and uncanny shotmaking are not being
shown in writing seminars.
But Bathsheba Monk took what Bird said in the
1980s about time slowing down when he played, how he was able to see plays a
split second before they developed, and applied it to her writing.
"That's what stories do," says Monk,
who lives in Allentown, Lehigh County, but was raised in Bethlehem. "They
give you time to think in a nonemotional sense. These people aren't you, but
you can think about how they relate to your own life. That's a kind of slowing
down, I think, examining what this means to everybody, not just you."
Monk's first novel, "Nude Walker," is
set in Warrenside, a fictional post-industrial town in Eastern Pennsylvania. A
young woman, Kat Warren-Bineki, returns home from a tour of duty in Afghanistan
with the National Guard. Her family once owned Warren Steel, and she joined the
Guard on an impulse after an argument with her mother.
Monk's own story mirrors the character. She
joined the Army after being told by her parents she wasn't going to college.
"I had to leave, too, in order to get an
outsider point of view," Monk says.
Thus began a journey that took Monk to Germany
and France, begat a brief marriage to a "WASP I met in Paris," and
time in Boston where she sold paintings out of a studio while she attempted to
write fiction. She, eventually, mended fences with her family and returned
home. In 2007, she published "Now You See It ... Stories from Cokesville,"
a short-story collection about Polish-American families in a Rust Belt town.
Monk thought she would be embraced as "some
kind of hero" for bringing attention to her hometown.
"But, in fact, I wasn't because I told what
they saw as their story," she says. "I wasn't afraid of hurting
people; I wasn't afraid of what they would say or think about what I wrote. It
wasn't even on my scope. ... I think people want to have control of their
narrative. They want some control of how they're seen, and they do that by
wanting to tell their stories themselves with the same slant on it. When
somebody like me comes in and says 'This is how I see you guys,' it's really
not appreciated."
"Nude Walker" might cause similar
emotion in the Lehigh Valley. Kat's return home is cast as part of an ensemble
piece. The author relates the stories of Guard members including Duck Wolinsky,
Kat's longtime boyfriend who presses for marriage; and Max, an interpreter of
Lebanese descent who becomes Kat's love interest. There's also Wind Storm, the
last of the Lenape tribe who desperately wants to hold onto her ancestral home;
and Dr. Edward Asad, Max's father and a scholar-turned-businessman who wants to
build a casino to revitalize the town.
"Everything is filtered through me,"
Monk says. "Obviously, I'm not all these characters in the book, but I
feel like I am all of them. I'm not Native American, but I think, if I'm good
at anything, it's finding the commonality between myself and other
people."
The novel's multiple viewpoints coalesce during
the final chapters, when a flood ravages Warrenside. The National Guard unit is
called out again, and the various personalities clash, just as they did in
Afghanistan. Monk's kaleidoscopic approach becomes focused on a final scene
when the past and the future finally meet.
"My whole point of view has been changing
lately because I think we're getting out of that era where we're analyzing
ourselves," Monk says. "We're looking at ourselves more in
relationship to society as a whole. In the book I said this about the Afghanis,
that they measure their time on Earth in generations. And that's the kind of
feeling I had when I was writing the ending."
Read more: 'Nude
Walker' combines a kalidescope of views of post-war life - Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/ae/books/s_726769.html##ixzz1HGEODwUm
Bathsheba
Monk sets her 'Nude Walker' on a difficult stroll
Published: Monday,
March 14, 2011, 4:09 PM Updated: Monday, March 14, 2011,
5:03 PM
Karen
R. Long, The Plain Dealer
Fernando Botero's enigmatic painting "The Bath"
graces the cover of Bathsheba Monk's first novel, "Nude Walker." It
is an inspired choice: If the figure intrigues, chances are the reader will be
drawn into the story; if she repulses, look for another book.
The nude walker is Barbara Warren-Bineki, 43,
heir to the now-defunct Warren Steel, once the economic engine of Warrenside,
Pa. We are not meant to like her -- she's a snob, 100 pounds overweight,
cycling on and off her antidepressants. When she goes off these drugs, she
finds herself stripping, grabbing a handbag and strolling out the front door.
"Her own Presbyterian background told her
she wasn't responsible for -- well, for anything actually. Her faith told her
that she was part of the Elect just by being born rich, so no worries
there."
Monk sets her characters in motion around the
return of the 501st unit of the National Guard from deployment in Afghanistan.
The novel starts with Kat Warren-Bineki, Barbara's daughter, trudging
across the Bagram tarmac to board the C-128 on the first leg home:
"At twenty-five years old, I was still
young enough to think that things happened once and they were over; too young
to know that human beings are, as my mother would say, a broken record."
Kat joined up to spite Barbara and is trailing
her childhood boyfriend, Duck Wolinsky, a decent sort intent on marrying Kat.
He describes the unit's giddiness as the soldiers ride a bus back into
Warrenside:
"We were home, where we could hunt deer
in the fall; and home, where we could take a walk without inhaling burning
sewage; and home, where we could speak to people without translators; and home,
where we could tell our friends from enemies because everyone had the courtesy
to wear the right [standard expletive] uniform."
Monk grew up in a large mining family in Hazelton,
Pa., joined the Army, saw the world and, some 20 years later, settled into
Allentown, Pa., to write fiction. Part of what makes her work wonderful is her
feel for the hard-pressed U.S. industrial town, captured most magically in her
debut collection of stories, "Now
You See It . . . Stories From Cokesville, Pa."
In the five years between books, the fortunes
of such hamlets have darkened, and so has Monk's mood. She introduces
xenophobia, as the Warrens of Warrenside are supplanted by the immigrant
Asads of Lebanon, whose patriarch has prospered buying up real estate, running
a strip club and brooking no challenges within his family and clan.
To bookend the Warrens, and underscore the
turning wheel of power, Monk also weaves in Wind Storm, the last American
Indian in town. She is tall and beautiful and half-Swedish, and she
gives shaman-style readings to white women desperate to know their romantic
futures.
Kat complicates hers on the flight home,
igniting an affair with Max Asad, Princeton graduate, fluent in Pashto and
Dari, returning after his service as a translator in Afghanistan for Special
Ops.
Even as Duck stands next to her bus seat,
"Max squeezed my hand," Kat tells us. "I was Eve in the Garden
of Eden. The apple was delicious, and yes, thank you, I'll take another bite.
Like Eve, I understood the consequences of my appetite, and I didn't
care."
One needn't be a biblical scholar to know how
this will end. "All people have myths," Wind tells us, "to
justify their desires."
Monk is a fantastic writer, and her short stories
are incandescent. "Nude Walker" shows the same pared-down craft, the
same glints of sly intelligence, but it's rougher on its characters. Two-thirds
of the way through, violence and senselessness swamp the story, even as Warrenside
is scourged by a biblical flood. Like all such natural catastrophe, it feels
unearned.
I am intrigued by Botero's painting; I am glad to have entered Monk's
book. The author gives Barbara a much happier ending than any of us would
guess. The story is enchanted by a blue heron and a necklace made of lapis
lazuli.
Still, when it comes to fictional spells, I am
going back to Cokesville. "Nude Walker" left me bruised and unhappy
in my own skin.
Karen R. Long is book editor of The Plain
Dealer.
Romeo and Juliet in the rust belt
Nude Walker
By
Bathsheba Monk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 272 pp. $25.
Reviewed by Martha Woodall
For her first novel,
Nude Walker, Bathsheba Monk
gives readers a Romeo-and-Juliet tale set in a rust-belt pocket of Pennsylvania
she calls Warrenside.
Instead of Capulets and Montagues, Monk gives us Warrens and Asads, facing
one another across economic, religious, and cultural barriers. And instead of
16th-century Verona, she gives us a 21st-century American community whose face
is changing to the accompaniment of fear and bigotry.
It's a rewarding read.
The Warrens, who were among the region's original Protestant settlers, became
steel barons who not only operated the now-defunct mills that fueled the area's
economy but also owned most of the land and ran everything from the electric
company to the country club.
While the Warrens' wealth and influence have faded and the fortunes of
Warrenside itself have declined, Edward Asad, a wealthy, enterprising Lebanese
immigrant, has moved in with his family and opened the Lucky Lady strip club.
He's also bought up distressed properties with an eye toward remaking the
downtown as an entertainment center with one of Pennsylvania's newly authorized
casinos.
Even though the Asads are Maronite Catholic, Edward Asad has persuaded his
Princeton-educated son, Max, to join the local National Guard unit, the 501st,
to demonstrate the family's post-9/11 patriotism and counter suspicion that the
Asads are Muslim terrorists, or at least sympathizers.
The novel opens in 2004 as the 501st returns from a yearlong deployment in
Afghanistan. The unit's members include Kat Warren-Bineki, the last of the
Warren clan, who joined to defy her mother and to deflect pressure from her
longtime boyfriend, Duck Wolinsky, to marry.
"Of course, I loved Duck, but I didn't feel passion, which I thought was like
you had to be with that person or you would kill yourself, like Romeo and
Juliet," Kat confesses early on. "With Duck I never felt that desperation. But
wasn't that a good thing?"
When Max and Kat fall in love, she immediately recognizes what was missing in
her relationship with Duck. Naturally, both the Warren-Binekis and the Asads and
all their friends oppose the romance.
Monk, the author of the short-story collection, Now You See It . . .
Stories From Cokesville, PA., has assembled a colorful, slightly loopy cast
of characters, including Wind Storm, a half-Lenape, half-Swedish shaman who uses
sage and sweet grass to evoke visions; Edward Asad, an expert on pre-Islamic,
Arabic, and Persian literature whose mistress is the most popular stripper at
his club; and Kat's father, Mike Bineki, who devises a scheme to embezzle from
his former employer.
Then there's Kat's mother, Barbara, a schizophrenic who lugs around a
tattered copy of the Warren family history and has a tendency to shed her
clothes and stroll downtown when she's off her meds.
Unfortunately, Max, who plays the pivotal Romeo role, is one of the
least-realized actors in the drama. The quietly assured Lebanese-American
recites Rumi and excels at backgammon and cards, but readers are not sure what
makes him tick. He remains elusive - more archetype than his rival, Duck.
Along the way, there's a subplot involving toxic waste; a legend that the
Lenape who were forced to relocate to Oklahoma from land along the Catawissa
River will return, and a flooding of that river that mobilizes the 501st.
Monk relates it all in such bright, breezy style that the violence is all the
more shocking when it comes.
The author also artfully delineates the continuing cycle of shifting power
and changing ethnic landscapes that began when the first English settlers
arrived at the fertile bend of the Catawissa in the 1630s and gradually
displaced the Lenape.
"What looks like randomness is merely unawareness of the time it takes for
the wheel to turn a click," observes Edward Asad, who had been a firm believer
in his family's providence.
"Lady Luck is usually pictured on a wheel with four figures representing the
stages of life: I shall reign on the left; I reign on the top:
I have reigned on the right; and on the left, bottom, I have no
kingdom."
In Nude Walker, Monk suggests more nuanced possibilities for
Warrenside and its inhabitants.
A Review of Bathsheba Monk’s Nude Walker
by Eric D. Goodman
Nude Walker by Bathsheba Monk is, in many ways, a novel about
change.
Change is a theme worth exploring in a multitude of ways, and the author does
so in this book. People tend to approach change differently. There is the
sense of loss—loss of innocence, loss of fitting into a comfortable place or
system. Then there’s the glimpse of gain—change for the better, making steps to
an improved tomorrow. One may lament innocence lost or celebrate wisdom gained;
might look at a crumbling city and either long for the days that used to be or
picture opportunities for fresh beginnings. And oftentimes, it’s not one or
another but both of these feelings that jockey for our feelings.
Monk successfully navigates a collection of characters through the changes in
their hometown, changes in their relationships, their cultures, and themselves.
We see the dilapidated city of Warrenside, Penn. through the eyes of a number of
characters. Three of them are returning home from a tour in Afghanistan: Kat,
Duck, and Max. In a classic love triangle, Duck loves Kat and Kat loves Max.
But Max is also scheduled to participate in an arranged marriage and take his
place as heir to his father’s commercial empire.
We also see Warrenside through the eyes of old souls confronted with the new
world. Wind, a half-Swedish Native American, struggles to keep the ways of her
ancestors even in impossible conditions. Kat’s mother, Barbara, clings to the
old-money legacy of her privileged past long after it has dissolved around her.
And Max’s father, Dr. Asad, must reinvent his vision of the future when life
gets in the way of his life’s plan.
The alternating points of view are handled with care. Oftentimes in such
books it can be easy to become bored with one character, waiting to get back to
another. But in Nude Walker, it’s easy for the reader to care about all
of these characters. Although they are perhaps not equally lovable, they are
rendered by the author with equal compassion.
Especially nice are moments in the book when the reader realizes conflicting
hopes—the wants of characters at odds with one another. (I hope Duck gets the
girl, I hope Kat gets her guy, I hope Dr. Asad’s hard work isn’t all in
vain). Yes realization of one is automatically the crushing of another.
Also, the theme of old ways dying off, the need to reinvent a person place,
or way of life, was at once somber and comforting.
The book brims with the sense that every fortune is built on another’s
misfortune, that the “wheel” of fortune is always in motion, passing from one
person to another. This goes for relationships and personal hopes and dreams
as well as for business goals.
Wind sums up a major theme in the novel when she looks at all that is holding
her back from living her life and determines in a refreshing moment of
revelation, “You are not me.”
Not to make Bathsheba Monk’s debut novel sound like a lesson book. These
themes are undercurrents to the exciting story of these three-dimensional
characters and their captivating situations. Nude Walker is an
enjoyable read that just might teach us something about ourselves and the world
that is changing around us.
—
Eric D. Goodman is the author of Tracks, a novel in stories being
published by Atticus Books on June 30. He
regularly reads his fiction on Baltimore’s NPR station, WYPR, and at book
festivals and literary events. His work has appeared in The Baltimore
Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Writers Weekly, Grub Street, Scribble, Arabesques
Review, and New Lines from the Old Line State: An Anthology of Maryland
Writers, among others.
BATHSHEBA MONK
