My colleague, David Berlinski, is a profound and adroit writer on matters scientific. But he admits that he has no talent for the close plotting and realistic dialogue of a novel. Fortune, however, has given him two children who do: Claire (a sometime novelist living in Istanbul and working on a new non-fiction book on Margaret Thatcher) and a son, Mischa. A few weeks ago, David let it drop that Mischa had written a "wonderful" first novel called Fieldwork that was published by the grand house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and had just been nominated for the National Book Award.
I read it. Now I recommend that you read it. In Fieldwork the youngest Berlinski has told a story of surpassing grace and compassion about the modern human person, set out in an unlikely place--northern Thailand, close to the dangerous Burmese border--and introducing characters that are at once familiar and exotic: a family of Christian missionaries, a Berkeley anthropologist and the droll and admirable hill tribes of a region now rife with change and intrigue. Berlinski got to know such people living in Thailand and, having visited there, I was delighted by the verisimilitude of his novel's descriptions of street life and modern bureaucracies as much as that of the legacy of primitive culture found in hamlets one has to walk to find. Shades of the estimable Graham Greene.
The story is memorably inventive. The "Dyalo," the hill tribe Berlinski has created, has its own language, customs, food, clothing and, of course, religion. I can't think of another writer (even Conrad) who shows such engaging artifice. These people not only are believable, but they also are identifiably cousins to the actual tribes of the Golden Triangle, such as the Hmong and the Karen.
Fieldwork is a murder mystery that is so enthralling that you will want to read it through in a few sittings. It is also almost satirical in its comic outlook, yet avoids cynicism. (The Washington Post reviewer called it "disturbing and entertaining.") Ultimately, you fall in love with practically everyone. All by itself that makes it worth your time, and the time of anyone real that you already love and wish to gift this season. They'll thank your for this novel when they get it and thank you again, with still greater sincerity, once they experience it.
I have been thinking lately about how hard it is for people with different world views to communicate with one another. Within our own culture the difficulties are almost equal to those of dealing with other cultures. Maybe one reason I resonated so much to Fieldwork is that David Berlinski seems to have this very subject on his finely tuned and intuitive mind.