Bark and Bite of the Underdog, in Many Pointed Guises

SCAR VEGAS And Other Stories

by Tom Paine

Harcourt

$22, 216 pages

*

“The world loves me.” When his fellow Princeton alumnus asks him if he’s worried about the dangers of his planned solo yacht trip, Eliot, the wealthy amateur sailor in this collection’s opening tale, claims not to be worried at all. To Eliot, the idea that anything bad could happen to him is inconceivable.

But the reader knows otherwise, having just witnessed a gut-wrenching scene in which Eliot’s boat is wrecked and Eliot himself, badly injured, is clinging to the wreckage. The scene of his armchair boast is a flashback. Yet even after three days go by, Eliot remains confident. He is pulled from the sea by some Haitian refugees, several families crammed together on a homemade raft, who feel more confident of their own rescue now that they have a bona fide American on board. The deeper irony is that Eliot’s blithe self-confidence proves justified. Every effort is made to rescue the over-privileged American man-child from the consequences of his own folly, while the lives of the poor Haitians count for nothing.

All 10 stories in Tom Paine’s “Scar Vegas” show a strong sympathy for the underdog and a fierce indignation at injustice wherever it may be happening. The stories are well written. One wonders, however, if the extent to which one enjoys them depends on whether or not the reader shares the political views expressed in them. Certainly the first story, “Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot,” is not only a breathtakingly vivid account of a shipwreck but a powerful parable for our times. Gritty realism and trenchant allegory are again combined in “A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the Stock Market Breaking 6,000.” Here we meet Melanie Applebee, recently a hotshot financial consultant, now out of a job, out of cash, out of credit, plunged into the nether world of the very same people thrown out of work by her own downsizing, wage- and benefit-cutting programs. Yet even having become one of them, she has no sympathy for underdogs, no remorse for what she has done.

“General Markman’s Last Stand” offers hard evidence of the oft-overlooked truth that homophobia harms not only homosexuals but heterosexuals. The story’s eponymous hero, a U.S. Marine general famed for his courage under fire, is threatened with the loss of his pension, position and happy marriage when one of his fellow Marines finds out that Markman (who is not gay) likes to wear women’s undergarments.

On the other hand, one may just as much admire the ecological point made in “The Hotel on Monkey Forest Road,” but still find this particular story tedious and long-winded. The opposite seems true of “The Battle of Khafji,” a tautly written tale whose effectiveness is diminished by the illogic and heavy-handedness of its message. There is, as this account of a Marine unit in the Gulf War brings home to us, something disturbing about the similarity of high-tech weapons to video games. But the danger of forgetting that real people are being killed was already a problem when the invention of firearms allowed killing from a distance. Paine has one Marine pose the portentous question, “Is it still a war if nobody dies on one side?” This point has been made many times by some of the same people who used to criticize wars because “our boys” were being sacrificed.

Would Paine have us believe it might be preferable, more “sporting” somehow, if American servicemen were killed in droves by chemical or biological weapons, just to even things up? One feels this is not so much an anti-war story as an anti-any-use-of-force-by-America story. It is good to find a writer so unafraid of tackling such moral and political issues--if only his messages were as sharply and carefully honed as his prose.