WHY BELIZE?

An American expat in Belize City contends with the sudden appearance of her former in-laws in Nelsestuen’s novel.

Eileen Sologoski flees her old life in Michigan for a new life in Belize, though the weather-beaten seaside capital city is not precisely as she imagined it would be. The 47-year-old woman left behind a husband, two nearly grown children, and a teaching job in the middle of the school year, arriving in the country with little money and no employment prospects. She rents a room for 50 dollars a month in the home of a Belizean man named Eduardo and his German wife, Kita. Like Eileen, Kita is fleeing a troubled past, one she would prefer not to discuss. “You are here now,” she advises Eileen. “Make a new life for yourself.” Eileen finds a job as a tour guide leading busloads of day-trippers to see the local Mayan ruins. She even devises a new name for herself: Lennie Solo. Lennie manages not to think too much about the life she left behind—her husband James, her twin boys just starting college—when James’ parents arrive in Belize City on a cruise ship. Confronted with the judgmental presence of Edgar and Wilma Sologoski, Lennie is forced to consider the decisions that brought her to Belize and what decisions might send her back home again. Nelsestuen has a musical sense of language, his sentences capturing the rhythms of both the landscape and the people who move through it: “On both sides of the road Brahman-crossed cattle walked in nonchalant patterns…The sagging wattles at their throats wagged back and forth. Fences of four barbed wires stretched taut against reinforced wooden corner posts and the braces struck Edgar as not unlike his own farm.” It’s a quiet novel, and not as dramatic as it threatens to be at the outset. But the narrative manages to depict midlife crisis in all its messy self-involvement. Fans of Nelsestuen’s other novels will appreciate his continued exploration of the existential questions of middle age.

A thoughtful, quiet meditation on aging.