Customer Reviews

Well Founded Fear

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Well Founded Fear is a thrilling, subversive, intelligent and deceptive novel. Readers of Don DeLillo will surely see the influence and will be thrilled that LeClair's linguistic virtuousity rivals the Don himself. Part international mystery, part legal thriller, part romance, the novel follows lawyer Casey Mahan on her seemingly altruistic trip to Greece. Mahan, while interviewing Kurdish applicants for asylum in Athens, finds that there is much to be done: Kurds in Iraq and Turkey are being murdered and tortured for reasons that are painfully apparent. The Kurds are being persecuted. Mahan works inside a legal system that cannot help as much as it needs to, and she wants to make a difference. And then she does. But can this difference actually make a difference in the terrorized lives of those who suffer? Read the novel.

LeClair, in this brave work, attacks the governments that practice persecution, but also cautions those on the outside (us Americans) against blind altruism. That the novel is deceptive there can be no doubt. But there is a heart behind it that is magnanimous. Like the novels of Delillo, Richard Powers, and Joseph McElroy, Well-founded Fear has global import and concern. Broad in scope, yet fine in its particulars, this novel shouts: "Wake up. Look what's going on around you. And do something."

Just be careful how you do it.

For anyone interested in the plight of the Kurdish peoples, this new novel by Tom LeClair is a must-read. A fast-paced, exciting story of a Kurdish "subversive" in Turkey and the human rights lawyer who attempts to rescue him, this novel goes a long way toward enhancing our understanding of what it means to be displaced in the world. The language is crisp, the story sophisticated, and the subject timely. This novel should be required reading for the U.S. Department of State, as well as the United Nations--maybe someone can even get Barbara Bush to read it to her son. So if you wonder why the 101st Airborne was dropped into northern Iraq last Spring, or why the United States recently took control of Kurdish oil revenues here is your explanation.

Tom LeClair, Well-Founded Fear (Olin Frederick, 2000)

We are three days into 2010 as I write this, and I have already sent my first book flying out the window, Tom LeClair's Well-Founded Fear. Another reviewer, quoted on the book jacket, says that "Lovers of language will be thrilled and occasionally awed by how the bounds of language are extended here". I have no idea what book he was reading, but I suspect it was not Well-Founded Fear, a book whose language's characteristics are "plodding" and "dull" at best. Half the time, LeClair sounds more like a textbook than like John LeCarre (to whom he is compared in the jacket copy). But given that every review I've read of this book to date goes on and on about how wonderful the language is, don't take my word for it. Here's a sample for you:

"UNHCR's hundred-year-old neoclassical building, with enough rooms for any Athenian family, was like a nineteenth-century American asylum, jammed with the agitated and the impassive, the impoverished and the eccentric, men in gowns, women in what looked like pajamas, children in rags, some people waiting in desert silence, and others contributing to a pandemonium that didn't sound human. As I walked through the narrow halls in my suit, I felt as if the scattered street people of Cincinnati--sidewalk-tanned men who draped themselves in bedspreads, black women who spluttered cracked dialects, pasty-faced kids recently arrived from Kentucky hills--had been gathered up and transported here, jammed almost as tight as economy passengers in a chartered jumbo." (18-19)

As a side note, if you have enough money to charter a jumbo, call me. I could use some of it.

If someone wants to tell me how the passage above compares to LeCarre (or DeLillo, to whom I just found another LeClair comparison), then by all means, explicate away. Until I see a rational argument, I'll just assume the reviewers involved have no earthly idea what they're talking about, or are reading a different book entirely. This is language that compares to that of Noah Ashenhurst (Comfort Food), Roger Hailey (Museum: The Dark Knight Chronicles), or David Jackson (Einstein's Design). Yes, we have three hundred sixty-two days left in 2010, but if Well-Founded Fear doesn't make my ten worst reads, this will be my worst year of reading since I started keeping records. Absolutely awful. (zero)