Danticat’s fiction is in touch with fact in Haiti

Fate has a sense of humor that leans toward the macabre. While giving generously, she seldom forgets to calculate the eventual take.

In 1995, the young Edwidge Danticat, having emigrated with her parents from Haiti to the United States at age 12, burst into literary visibility with her short story collection “Krik? Krak!” -- the folksy Creole call-and-response chant encouraging storytellers to spin their tales. Critics welcomed her fresh, assured and lyrical voice, the insights into a rich culture that seems remote to most American minds, no matter how close Haiti lies to our shore. That book arrived a year after U.S. Marines entered Haiti to restore democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, ending his exile and a bloody, despotic interregnum. During an ensuing period of fragile stability on the island and comparative optimism for Haiti-watchers everywhere, Danticat followed her debut success with the novels “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “The Farming of Bones,” in which she continued her exploration of the modern Haitian experience through a mingling of personal recollection and concentrated imagination, earning praise from critics and a widening, enthusiastic readership.

Under any circumstances, those readers would be thirsty for “The Dew Breaker,” Danticat’s first full-length fiction in five years. Given recent events in Haiti, culminating (for the moment) in Aristide’s flight amid looting, murder and terror, this novel is likely to inspire interest far greater than anything the good people at her publishing house might originally have hoped for. Like a young Cassandra, gifted with the sight whether she wants it or not, Danticat chose as her plot and moral theme the predicament of a one-time Haitian “Volunteer” or “Dew Breaker” in Baby Doc’s service -- an enforcer, that is to say, a torturer, a depraved sadist, an executioner -- who has defected to the United States to build a new, irreproachable existence. The result is thrillingly topical and bound to take Danticat’s name still further. But it’s a fair bet that this author would have willingly sacrificed her projected sales figures and interviews if that were the price for sparing Haiti its current strife.

What of the novel itself? It takes time to ease into, while enticing the reader to keep up the effort with individually riveting scenes. Danticat’s structural approach is unapologetically literary, of the anti-Aristotelian camp. Carefully wrought as the book is, there is no particular continuity of chronology, place or character.

Each of the nine chapters (bearing titles such as “The Book of the Dead” or “The Bridal Seamstress”) could stand alone as a contained short story -- some in fact have. Two or three chapters float nearly independent of the novel’s premise, in worlds of their own. (Does Danticat herself appear, in fine Postmodernist style, as the tyro journalist? “A striking Haitian American girl with waist length dreadlocks” who later decides, “men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every space in their lives ... these were the people [she] wanted to try to write about.”

Even the more distant chapters shine. The emigre widow of an executed painter recalls her husband’s proud moment: a request by a visiting American first lady to have him paint her portrait. “She said in that whispery baby voice that she wanted the harbor behind her ... and a few Haitian faces on the pier. So my husband painted her ... and put me in the background. If you ever come across that painting, somewhere between the Port-au-Prince harbor and Jackie Kennedy, you will see me.”

“The Dew Breaker” plays a coy game with names: The central characters in each chapter and story tend to be unnamed; they may or may not correspond to others illuminated elsewhere at other points in their lives. The spotlight moves without comment. The reader is forced to seek clues, to remember, to read back and forth ... trying to piece an identity out of scraps, much as certain of the Dew Breaker’s surviving victims try to pinpoint him among the middle-aged, petit-bourgeois immigrants of their Van Nostrand Avenue neighborhood, and much as his own hotheaded daughter strives zealously during a church service to recognize a thug of more recent vintage in the congregation. Mistakenly, it turns out.

Elliptical at the beginning, squinting only sideways at its once torturing and now tortured protagonist, the book gathers impressive focus and force. Arguably, the drive to pull every strand together takes the story further than needed, with twists that strain credulity. But that is not what matters most. One is reminded page after burning page that merely to enter this character’s mind and memory is virtually taboo in these times of President Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” The Dew Breaker is by definition outside the pale, not us, and most contemporary writers would feel more competent to explore the consciousness of a dragonfly or a Martian. Danticat leads her readers into the underworld. It’s furnished like home.