SNOW

by Jenifer Levin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 1983

Raina Scott--hunter/explorer, modern-day Artemis, ""our new Amelia Earhart""--has been missing for two years, lost (along with others) on an expedition into the interior of Bellagua, a backward Caribbean island-nation with the usual political set-up: shaky military government; idealistic rebels; secretly dominant US-corporate interests. However, ex-track star Lee Simmonds, Raina's non-sexual husband/pal/business-partner, is sure that Raina is alive--and he's planning a search-expedition. Likewise, Raina's beautiful young lesbian lover Karlen (disowned daughter of John Zachary, the tycoon who controls Bellagua) has come to the island to find Raina--who seems to be in mystical contact with Karlen. Furthermore, Jewish, Peru-born photographer Pablo Klemer--who won fame with pictures of Raina--is also on the island, taking photos for a tourist brochure. (He falls for Karlen.) And, indeed, it eventually appears that Raina is alive: she has become a living goddess among those native rebels, who are suffering mightily (birth defects, mutilation, death) from ""snow""--a defoliant produced by Zachary Chemicals, supplied to the government forces and their ruthless mercenaries. Levin's second novel, then, unlike her more intensely focused Water Dancer debut (1982), is an ungainly sprawl, getting thoroughly out of hand when Pablo's estranged brother Gabriel--an Israeli agent, hunting down a neo-Nazi-ish clan called the ""Snowmen""--also pops up on Bellagua. (Pablo is soon trying to escape the island with photo-evidence of ""snow,"" then joining a N.Y.-based freedom brigade to aid Bellagua rebels . . . which turns out to be a front for the Snowmen!) Thematically, too, there's lurching excess here: Levin, while heaping on a labored array of white/snow images, also wrestles with capitalism, Zionism, Nazism, the gestalt of sports and games, competition, sexuality, and sex-roles. (Levin's women are all, to an almost cartoonish degree, super-women.) Still, though even more flawed than Water Dancer, this murky hybrid--somewhat reminiscent of Don DeLillo's The Names--reaffirms Levin's undeniable talents: strong page-by-page writing (assured, intelligent), a rare sense of full-length-fiction pacing. And one continues to have the sense that this promising writer--once out of a certain sort of trendy, political/sexual quagmire--will produce original, fully involving fiction.

Pub Date: Feb. 27, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Poseidon/Pocket Books--dist. by Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION