The Season of Their Discontent

It takes a certain sleight of hand to write a novel that is so suffused in place, yet one in which place is largely absent from its pages. Peter Cameron’s “The City of Your Final Destination” is set in the deep forest of Uruguay. However, this remote locale is almost incidental to the novel; the real focus is the relations among a group of eccentric characters, who are all disconnected--from their homes, their pasts, even from themselves.

Omar Razaghi, an Iranian-born, hapless graduate student, sets off to Uruguay to gain permission to write the biography of Jules Gund, a Jewish writer who committed suicide after publishing a masterpiece, “The Gondola.” There, Omar encounters an odd trio: Gund’s widow, his mistress and his brother, all of whom live on a crumbling family estate and are caught in a state of suspended animation, as if Jules had put the pistol to his head only yesterday.

They are like characters in a Chekhov play, only they don’t have a Moscow to dream of. The family’s gondola, now sunk in mud and weeds next to a lake, is the central image of rot and stasis, and it is into this swamp that the clumsy, innocent Omar stumbles.

What’s sly about this novel is that the bigger dramas are kept offstage. After all, there is a dead writer, a wife and mistress who live in the same house but barely speak and the possibility of smuggled goods from Nazi Germany through Adam, the bitter and sardonic brother. Though this is the stuff of melodrama and thriller, Cameron has crafted a fascinating domestic drama as if he wanted to settle down in the courtyard and listen to these people talk, snared in their suffocating web of old hostilities. The novel often reads like a play as the characters wander around the dilapidated set, quarreling and quibbling, and getting nowhere.

Cameron’s sketch of the passive Omar is dead-on: “I am afraid I am very cowed by reality,” he admits to Caroline, the mistress, when he is supposed to be convincing her of the merit of his biography project. So is his portrait of Omar’s annoying and willful girlfriend, Deirdre, who shows up when Omar has an accident, and only makes matters worse.

Deirdre is the only character who does not seem a part of this hermetic world, and who believes she can direct fate, only to botch up everything. “These people are awful,” she thinks at one point. “They’re all thwarted and poisonous. They need lots of therapy.”

Arch, ironic, “The City of Your Final Destination” also succeeds as a comedy of manners that pokes fun at literary careerism and turns entertainingly on the testy exchanges between people who are not happy, and would not admit it if they were. I kept envisioning this as a cross between a West End Edwardian play with characters hitting the dusty pillows and flinging themselves into chairs, and a Merchant-Ivory production in which the lush visuals would fill in. When Adam asks Deirdre about Omar, it becomes a game of double-entendre:

“‘And how is he?’

“‘He seems well, considering.’

“‘Considering what?’

“‘Considering his accident,’ said Deirdre.

“‘Aren’t we all.’

“‘Aren’t we all what?’ asked Deirdre.

“‘Aren’t we all well, considering our accidents,’ said Adam.

“Deirdre did not reply.”

Omar’s dreamy, intuitive nature eventually leads him toward a career and life that make sense. And ever so gently, without meaning to, he is the one who tilts everyone toward their final destination. This quiet unfolding is Cameron’s most subtle--and grand--achievement. For it is the ill-equipped Omar who magically holds the power to bring change to others, and it is his story we ultimately cheer.

The spirit of poet Elizabeth Bishop comes to play a nice, literary role in the book, and her famous line--”Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?”--hovers gently over these dispossessed souls.

Cameron has always had a delicate touch that harks back to the minimalist writers of the ‘80s who, with one devastating stroke of a line, could evoke an entire substrata of emotions. But this technique can sometimes feel a bit thin, for so much takes place in the here and now that we rarely glimpse the memories that lie beneath the surface.

In a novel that is so much about characters trapped by the past, I could have used a stronger sense of the writer Gund, who exerted such power over everyone. The triangle of the mistress and wife is only glancingly referred to, and we never quite grasp how these two women came to live under the same roof, and how they could bear it.

Cameron is almost too modest in his uncovering; too careful in avoiding the implied melodrama. I wouldn’t have minded a little more of the muck that covers and traps them all.