Siam: or The Woman Who Shot a Man by Lily Tuck (Overlook Press)
Claire flies to Thailand on her wedding night, a naive New Englander of twenty-five, in love with the dashing Army officer whom she’s just married. “The plane never caught up with the sun” but even so, when it lands in Bangkok, “it was bright day,” and Claire is surprised that she and James have lost their first day of marriage somewhere above the International Dateline.
This is only the first of many things that surprise her in her new home. Her questions are unending and she meets only one person who seems as though he would give her the answers she wants, the American Silk King who’s created a luxurious life for himself in a puzzling city. At one of his famous dinner parties, Jim Thompson leads Claire through his drawing room filled with art, antiques, and vases of fragrant blossoms. He takes the time to explain the meaning behind his precious objects before Claire has formed her questions and promises to show her more of his collection when he returns from a trip to Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. But he never comes back; the mystery of his disappearance preoccupies the Thai press and completely occupies Claire’s attention.
This serves to distract her from the other mysteries in her life: what takes her husband on his weekly trips to a secret airbase on the Thai border and keeps him there for days, what relationship exists between her cook, maid, and houseboy, who are the people who inexplicably show up in her kitchen, and did she really see a horse in the jungle that constitutes her back garden? Her trips to the nearest market make her “afraid that she will lose herself among the mangoes,” and her tall blonde visibility makes her wish that she were small, dark, and graceful instead.
Taking refuge in Thai language lessons and in books about the country’s history only partially distracts her from everything around her that seems unknowable. It’s what became of Jim Thompson that becomes an obsession for Claire, a mystery that seems potentially solvable, yet while she searches for puzzle pieces that might fit together, life insists on throwing fresh conundrums at her. Why does James insist that she learn to shoot a pistol? Why does the pretty wife of James’s “useful friend” Siri demand that James teach her how to swim and is she flirting with Claire’s husband? Is James flirting back?
As her life becomes more enigmatic, Claire begins to mistrust what she sees. Nothing seems solid. Objects, and people too, disappear for no reason. The more Thai she learns, the less she understands and her position in the world around her becomes more tenuous. Then one night she knows she hears the sound of sharp blades slicing through the window screens not far from her bedroom and in an instant her life implodes.
In her compact and surrealistic novel, Lily Tuck explores what it’s like for an American woman to be immersed in a world of savage contrasts: opulence and poverty, immediate gratification and complete incomprehension. Claire’s shadowed world is formed by curiosity and ignorance, fear and clumsy attempts at bridging cultural divides. Her paranoia will be recognized by any woman who has plunged into a new country with no preparation and little support, and every last one of them, if they’re honest, will admit to having shared a small portion of Claire’s terror and madness.~Janet Brown