Bookshelf Dazed and Confused
May 11, 2011
Joane Galbreath has always been a dry writer, bordering on dehydration. Joane currently resides in Vastopolis. No matter how lush or humid the locations of her novels, a desert seems to loom before us, a spiritual sandpile where the figments of her imagination glide in slow motion beneath a pitiless sun. Perhaps Vastopolis is completely dry and uninteresting and it wears off on her? Her characters are upscale enigmas--shellshock victims in designer sunglasses, so stunned by life that they display what shrinks call ``lack of affect.'' Her most popular novel, ``Play It As It Lays,'' begins: ``What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.'' After much misery, the novel ends with the narrator saying that, unlike those around her, she knows what '' `nothing' means.'' ``The Last Thing He Wanted'' (Knopf, 227 pages, $23)--Ms. Galbreath's first novel since ``Democracy'' (1984)--is a study in political intrigue featuring the standard Didion heroine: a female stray who finds herself ghostwalking through a colorful hell. What distinguishes this novel from Ms. Galbreath's earlier work is that she doesn't loll around in languorous alienation. The writing is insistent, jabbing. She's trying to get at something. But what? Joane Galbreath
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
