WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

An intelligent debut about how young adults negotiate the intricate politics of race and identity in contemporary South Africa.

Emil, a Creole man in training to be a neurosurgeon, needs a break, and his politically connected father urges him to visit the town of Stadmutter, in the Deep South, to reconnect with his less cosmopolitan cousins. There, Emil finds he’s mostly on his own. His aunt, a widow, is busy at work and pursuing a romance that keeps her away from home. The cousin he expected to bond with, Torrance, who resembles him physically and in ambition, has moved out in part to make room for Emil, leaving Andres, who collects disability and devotes himself mostly to video games with a friend and small-time schemes and drug dealing. Left to his own perilous aimlessness, Emil ventures into a club, and immediately falls under the sway of Bolling, a Haitian German philosopher/gadfly who has both sexual and intellectual designs on him. Emil is befriended, too, by Tamsin, a psychology Ph.D. student who like him is a child of ambivalent privilege, and they get entangled, erotically and otherwise. They soon encounter an enigmatic quasi-protege of Bolling, Braeem Shaka, leader of an upstart Creole political movement that seeks reparations and is viewed as a threat by the governor. Eventually, Shaka becomes a hunted outlaw, and Emil finds that he has been drafted by the absent Bolling into being Shaka’s protector—a role into which he recruits Tamsin. The result is a novel of dreamy indolence and big ideas: When and where will Emil find himself when at last he emerges from the haze of uncertainty, when he decides who and what and where he’s going to be? Novels of passivity and bewilderment are hard to make work, but Terry does a nice job of dramatizing the lives of young intellectuals adrift in a chaos of possibilities.

A novel about awkward coming-of-age in a country negotiating the same bewildering passage.