Waxwings: A novel - Hardcover

Raban, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375410082 ISBN 13: 9780375410086

Publisher: Pantheon, 2003

Synopsis

From the best-selling author of Passage to Juneau—“Raban at his best,” wrote Ian McEwan—an unsettling, tender, and always surprising novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, when the high-tech Gold Rush threatens to overwhelm the actual world with its myriad virtual alternatives.

Two immigrants, though, are drawn here by more traditional versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway—a Hungarian-born Englishman—it is the wife and son he thought he’d never have. For an illegal alien—Chick, as he comes to call himself—it is the land of opportunity he’d imagined back in Fujian province. Given the overheated service economy, mutual need introduces the writer–professor–NPR-commentator to this enterprising handyman, and each soon finds himself strangely dependent on the other. Because meanwhile, all around them, people are busily charting futures that are obscure to, or exclude, anyone else.

Waxwings masterfully depicts the social realities of a boomtown in flux, as well as the illusions that distract its inhabitants from the most basic human impulse: to create a place we can call home. This is what Chick dreams of achieving, and what Tom must suddenly struggle to preserve. As the NASDAQ index spirals upward, street riots break out, a terrorist is arrested, a child disappears, a jetliner goes down—and the city, rimmed with feral countryside, begins to emerge in its true colors.

The Washington Post proclaimed of Foreign Land that “Jonathan Raban’s achievements in this novel are nothing short of awesome,” and with Waxwings—exquisitely written and hugely entertaining—he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before that he “invests his characters with such freshness and warmth, writes prose of such Wordsworth-like beauty, and does it all with such effortless mastery that he takes the reader’s breath away.”

About this title

About the Author

The author of ten previous books, Jonathan Raban was born in England and since 1990 has lived in Seattle. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington.

From the Back Cover

"A generous, affirming novel."
--The New York Times Book Review

“The appearance of a new book by Jonathan Raban is a bit like the arrival of an unheralded comet. The heavens gently part and suddenly, here in orbit, shimmering with novelty, is a distinguished newcomer from an unimagined world.”
—Michael Thompson-Noel, Financial Times

"Waxwings teems with juicy, funny characters emblematic of their time and place . . . Raban knows how to bridge the gap between the broad social canvas of satire and the interior life of delicate, rounded characters."
--Entertainment Weekly
"Jonathan Raban calculates the radius of the Internet bubble with the cool eye of an investor who can spot real value [and] captures this exuberant era with striking efficiency. He prods us to consider that we're living in a period that makes us all somehow foreigners, desperate for residency."
--The Christian Science Monitor
"Raban is a canny writer . . . This is a generous, affirming novel."
--The New York Times Book Review

From the Inside Flap

From the best-selling author of <b>Passage to Juneau</b>―“Raban at his best,” wrote Ian McEwan―an unsettling, tender, and always surprising novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, when the high-tech Gold Rush threatens to overwhelm the actual world with its myriad virtual alternatives.<br><br>Two immigrants, though, are drawn here by more traditional versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway―a Hungarian-born Englishman―it is the wife and son he thought he’d never have. For an illegal alien―Chick, as he comes to call himself―it is the land of opportunity he’d imagined back in Fujian province. Given the overheated service economy, mutual need introduces the writer–professor–NPR-commentator to this enterprising handyman, and each soon finds himself strangely dependent on the other. Because meanwhile, all around them, people are busily charting futures that are obscure to, or exclude, anyone else.<br><br><b>Waxwings</b> masterfully depicts the social realities of a boomtown in flux, as well as the illusions that distract its inhabitants from the most basic human impulse: to create a place we can call home. This is what Chick dreams of achieving, and what Tom must suddenly struggle to preserve. As the NASDAQ index spirals upward, street riots break out, a terrorist is arrested, a child disappears, a jetliner goes down―and the city, rimmed with feral countryside, begins to emerge in its true colors.<br><br><i>The Washington Post </i>proclaimed of <b>Foreign Land</b> that “Jonathan Raban’s achievements in this novel are nothing short of awesome,” and with <b>Waxwings</b>―exquisitely written and hugely entertaining―he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before that he “invests his characters with such freshness and warmth, writes prose of such Wordsworth-like beauty, and does it all with such effortless mastery that he takes the reader’s breath away.”

Reviews

A Hungarian-born British expatriate settled in dot-com-frenzied Seattle is the bemused protagonist of this inspired jumble of a novel, travel writer Raban's first since 1985's Foreign Land. Tom Janeway is a professor of writing, a novelist and a public radio commentator; his wife, Beth, works for GetaShack.com, a startup providing virtual neighborhood tours for prospective house buyers. They have a four-year-old son named Finn, and they appear content. Behind the happy facade, though, Beth has grown deeply unhappy with her self-absorbed husband, his immersion in books and his pretentious radio voice ("his fucking rolled r's")-she hankers after expensive cars, a bright new condo and honest attention. Unfolding in counterpoint to Raban's chronicle of the rather civilized collapse of their marriage is the story of a shady Chinese immigrant called Chick; he survives a horrific journey to America and becomes an off-the-books contractor who bullies Tom into employing him to renovate their gloomy old house after Beth moves out. Beneath the surface, larger currents are swirling, and Tom is suddenly swept up in them when he goes for a walk on a local nature trail and is misidentified as a suspect in a series of child murders. Chick's unpredictable antics sharpen the sense of menace, while a subplot about an egotistical British novelist who is considering a residency at Tom's college provides effective comic relief. Raban's caustic, affectionate commentary on the manic gyrations of millennial America unites these disparate plot lines, making his novel a wry paean to the cluttered, freewheeling lives led by the motley residents of an immigrant nation.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Raban's second novel, which takes place amid Seattle's dot-com boom, satirizes the formerly sleepy city, its provincialism veneered by new wealth. Tom Janeway is an introverted British novelist and writing professor, whose wife, enriched by her job at a Web site, has left him. With his aged house rotting around him, Tom hires Chick, a recent illegal immigrant from China, to do repair work. Chick inveigles his way into Tom's household, enabling Raban to show the parallel struggles of two hapless outsiders adjusting to their adopted country. The novel succeeds in skewering a city so eager to amplify its own celebrity that even riots and terrorist plots become matters of pride. But while Raban writes with energy and incisiveness, his characters are thinly drawn, and his well-phrased sallies seem wasted on such familiar marks as the follies of the technology bubble and academic snobbery.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Two disparate characters come together under unusual circumstances in this novel of Seattle during the start-up Internet gold rush of the 1990s. Hungarian-born Tom, a self-absorbed English professor and regular commentator for NPR, finds himself with a floundering marriage and an emotionally disturbed son--two situations he cannot comprehend. Chick is a recent Chinese immigrant who entered the country in a metal container with 30 other men, barely escaping the INS. He finds shady construction work and is dedicated to becoming a successful American citizen, even running his own off-the-books construction business. The two men form an unlikely partnership when Chick appears on Tom's lawn, practically forcing Tom to hire his motley crew to repair Tom's roof. Chick squats in Tom's basement and provides support when Tom is questioned as a suspect in the disappearance of a child. Readers will be intrigued with Chick and his experiences finding work, living quarters, and a legal identity. Slow to start, the story gets up to speed almost halfway through and peters out occasionally until the end. Kaite Mediatore
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.



"November," the pilot said.

Wave-crests were breaking gray on a sea as black as crêpe. Ragged nimbus clouds brushed the ship's bridge. The lone spot of color was on the radar screen, where the coastline showed as a wide brushstroke of glowing copper.

"Steady as she goes," the pilot said. "Zero-seven-five."

"Zero-seven-five." Compact, broad-bottomed, the captain was a dense blot of shadow at the wheel.

They spoke quietly, as if they were in church. Eleven stories up from the water, the noise of the engines was a distant rumor. Though a westerly gale was blowing down Juan de Fuca Strait, it was inaudible on the bridge, for the ship had been built with hurricanes and typhoons in mind, and the bronchial churring of the air-conditioner drowned out whatever sounds were being made by the weather. The Pacific Auriga, 51,000 tons, bound for Seattle from Osaka and Hong Kong, was too big to notice the small sea on which it now found itself, its only apparent motion a slight mechanical vibration underfoot.

"You've got the Dungeness light there, Cap," the pilot said. "Starboard. Two o'clock."

"Yes, I've got it," the captain said, a little shortly, for he was an old hand on this run, and the pilot new to him. Stepping aboard from the launch off Port Angeles, the pilot presented himself on the bridge with a cocky, affectless assurance to which the captain, a New Zealander, took an immediate dislike. Now the young American was fiddling with the radar closest to the wheel, officiously targeting echoes.

"You can go to zero-eight-zero, Cap. The spit's right on the two-mile ring. Tide's making about three knots."

"We usually see Doug--Doug Nielsen?"

"Captain Nielsen's taking the week off. Family emergency."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

Ahead of the bridge, lines of stacked containers stretched away into the darkness. The water puddled on their tops caught the light from the deck below the bridge and glistened like a wet highway, blinding the Captain to the sea beneath the ship.

"Better slow her down to eleven, twelve knots--whatever's comfortable," the pilot said, voicing what the Captain had already decided. "We're in no hurry. You'll be dropping the hook for the night in Elliott Bay: they won't berth you at Harbor Island till five at the earliest."

"Your cabin's made up--the purser saw to it. David?" the Captain said to the lounging shadow of the Third Officer. "Could you rustle up a fresh pot of coffee? Coffee for you, Mr.--?"

"Warren," the pilot said, "Warren Kress," speaking his name for the second time in fifteen minutes. "You have decaf?"

"We're out of decaf," the Third Officer said. "I can make you a cup of tea, if you want."

"My wife's got me on decaf these days," Kress said. "I'll take a glass of water, though." As he moved away from the radar, he unfolded himself, slowly, in sections, and stood as tall as a basketball player. From somewhere above the Captain's head, he said, "Yeah, the funeral was today."

"Sorry?"

"Captain Nielsen's grandkid."

"Not the little girl? He was talking about her last time he was on board. She--died?"

"Yeah, she got killed. Five years old. It was just a couple days after her birthday."

"Oh, Jesus. What was it--a car accident?"

"A cougar."

The brand of car that ran her down? the Captain thought. Why does he have to say that?

"A mountain lion," the pilot said. "She was killed by a cougar."

"How?"

"She was at her day-care. In Sequim. It's a Montessori place in a new development out there, real close to the woods. Ashley--the kid--was playing by herself in the yard, a ways off from the others, and the cougar dragged her into the bushes. Teacher was in the bathroom--and I wouldn't care to be in her shoes right now. The other kids say they never heard her yell or anything. She just disappeared. First they thought she'd wandered off, then that a child-molester must've abducted her. They were running around looking for a man, and it was half an hour before they found her. A clean kill--one bite severed the carotid artery. Her right arm was gone, torn right out of the socket. Port fifteen, Captain: zero-eight-zero."

The pilot, his voice level and dispassionate, sounded like a radio announcer reading from a bulletin.

"They got the cat. The Fish and Wildlife guys treed and shot her about a mile away. They were lucky to find her, but the day-care's toast: they were meant to have a chain-link fence around the yard, according to code, and the subcontractor fouled it up. They'd only been open since Labor Day. The family's bringing suit."

To starboard, the low black hills inched slowly past, pin-pricked with tangerine lights. Sequim.

"Everyone's in shock. More'n a thousand people showed up for the funeral, so I heard."

"Poor bloody Doug," the captain said.

"Yeah, he's taking it hard. He was on a Korean bulk carrier outbound from Tacoma when it happened, and they broke it to him when he came off in the launch. Captain Nielsen, he's an older man--"

No older than me, the captain thought.

"--he lived for that kid, after his divorce. When he wasn't at work, he spent all his time around at his son's place, babysitting. It was kind of a joke with us, Doug and his babysitting."

"I didn't know he was divorced."

"He never talked about it. Wife left him two, three years back, and went down to live in Santa Barbara. Or Santa Fe. Santa someplace. His son's a realtor--got an office out on Highway 101. But now that Ashley has passed on--"

Passed on? Hunched over the wheel, looking out into the dark, the Captain was picturing the animal, a tawny shape-shifter, padding soundlessly through damp leaf mulch, and the child, talking to herself, absorbed in her play. "Passing on" was not the phrase he would've chosen for what was going to happen next. Though he didn't know Doug Nielsen well, he could feel his grief as a distinct hollow in his own gut, and didn't at all care for the young pilot's manner, in which there was a trace of something close, almost, to amusement.

"Coffee's up." It was the Third Officer. The Captain took his mug from the tray with a distracted grunt. "We're talking about Doug Nielsen," he said.

"Doug the pilot?"

"He lost his little granddaughter. The funeral was today."

"It was an accident waiting to happen," the pilot said. "When we logged the old-growth, we degraded that whole habitat. Now we're into third-growth, and a third-growth plantation just doesn't have the sustenance these critters need. By the end of summer, they're starving, so they come into the cities to scavenge--you can't blame them for doing what they need to survive. When you get cougars killing kids in schoolyards, it's a wake-up call." He peered for a moment into the hooded radar. "It's a wake-up call," he repeated, rolling the phrase as if he'd just minted it.

"That's how she died?" the Third Officer said. "A cougar?"

"And it's not just out on the Peninsula--it's happening right in Seattle. They've got cougars in Issaquah, garbage-bears in Woodinville. Around this time of year, the local news starts looking like 'Animal Planet,' with everybody shooting home videos of the wildlife in their yards. People used to get a thrill out of seeing a raccoon, but nowadays you're talking bobcats, skunks, black bears . . . critters that ought to be out hunting in the mountains. Instead, they're living out of trash-cans and Dumpsters in the 'burbs. You got the fairway buoy there, Cap.? There's a whole new generation of animals that's being raised on left-over pizza and burgers and fries."

The buoy was a cat's-eye flash of yellow in the darkness. At half speed, lying low on its lines, heavy with cargo, the Pacific Auriga made a wide turn to starboard.

"One-two-zero."

"One-two-zero."

As the ship slid southeastward into the gullet of Puget Sound, the Third Officer watched the radar painting echoes on the screen. He could put names to the echoes--Wilson, Marrowstone, Bush, Double Bluff--now that the ship was coming into familiar water. Familiar water, but queer land. Though he'd never given much attention to the perils of the sea, the Third Officer was horribly alert to the perils of the countryside. When he saw green fields, he instinctively thought of pawing bulls. A spell of shore leave at his sister's house outside Brisbane had been turned into agony by a casual warning about spiders in the toilet.

This had been a rough trip, dogged by small misfortunes of timing and weather, and he'd been looking forward to his layover in Seattle. But even though he meant to go no further from the ship than a ten-dollar cab ride (split with the Radio Officer), the thought of wild bears stalking the suburbs upset him greatly. To fight his phobia, he was forever telling himself that his fears were irrational--but that would cut no ice now, not in this city.

"Take your urban coyotes--" the pilot said.

Please, let's don't, the Third Officer thought.

"They're interbreeding with the domestic canids. Take a look at the dogs around here--at their jaws and the way they carry their tails. You'd be surprised by how many of them are half-coyote. You're getting German shepherd-coyote mixes, lab-coyote mixes, collie-coyote mixes . . . and you wouldn't want to meet these guys on a dark night, I'm telling you."

On the water, the co...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375410082
• ISBN 13: 9780375410086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288