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There are many such places in literature, creations like the Duchy of Grand Fenwick in Leonard Wibberley's The Mouse That Roared, a tiny English-speaking enclave that the author somehow managed to shoehorn into the middle of polyglot Europe.
Jesse Browner has invented such a place in his new novel, Turnaway. Turnaway is an island off the shore of the Bronx near the actual City Island. At 20 square acres, it is tinier even than Grand Fenwick, and, in its ordinariness, less comical than that Ruritanian duchy. Grand Fenwick was intended to entertain us and make us laugh. Turnaway, the novel and the island, entertains us and makes us think.
Just the fact that a number of real little islands dot the shoreline of New York City probably comes as news to a lot of us in the hinterlands. Probably a lot of New Yorkers who prefer to venture no farther than the boundaries of their own boroughs are unaware of them, too. But not Ben Givens. In his 11-foot, motorized dinghy, Spirit of New York, he prowls around them and the waterways of New York on a quest for oily canals and other wastelands that, as an amateur watercolorist, he loves to paint.
Ben, 31, is a bachelor who lives by himself. An orphan who grew up in a series of foster homes, he doesn't expect much from life, and life generally has fulfilled those expectations. Fittingly, however, it did give him a disabling subway accident, which in turn provided a financial settlement that enables him to eke out an existence without holding a job.
One stormy day Ben's dinghy, swamped by a freighter, founders in foggy waters. Unable to swim well because of his injuries, Ben only just makes it to the shore of an island he had never known of before, where he collapses. When he comes to in a warm bed, he is told that he is on Turnaway.
The man who tells him is Joseph Ross, an Austrian-Jewish doctor in his sixties who has lived on the island all his adult life. He lives there alone except for 29-year-old Elias Hutchinson, whom he calls the "Master" of Turnaway and to whom he acts as a devoted guardian. Elias, it turns out, is the proud last survivor of an Indian tribe, the Siwanoy.
Or is he? The story, which quickly grabs the reader's attention from the start, here becomes an even more engrossing web of confused and confusing identities, of illusions and self-delusions. Ben may have told himself lies about his past (his "accident," for instance, may not have been so accidental), and Elias, who lives only for his Indian heritage, has built himself a fiercely focused life based on an innocent misunderstanding.
When Ben takes Elias, who has not been off Turnaway since he was 14, to Manhattan, he tells himself, "I was his guide on a tour of one New York, but he became mine on a tour of another." Where Ben sees a New York of concrete and steel, Elias sees a 17th-century wilderness. Where Ben sees a famous building, Elias sees the site on which the white man cheated his ancestors. This is at the very least monomaniacal, but as Elias asks Ben, "Don't you think most people believe they were born in the wrong time?"
Finally and more grandly, the book can be seen as an allegory of Indian history, or as the history of Indians in microcosm. Elias relives for us the destruction of the Indian way of life and their despair at their inability to stop it. The possibility that he is not an Indian, of which he is not aware, only adds to the poignancy.
For Browner, this book is a remarkable feat, not only of imagination, but of research masterfully presented. His writing is sure and engaging, marred only by the continual misuse of like as a conjunction. But, all things considered, that is, like, a minor flaw.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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