White Man's Grave

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a galloping tale about a clash of worldviews, in this case between the insular West African Mende culture--complete with tribal politics and voodoo--and the pure red-blooded Caucasian American variety, with its highly rational citizens bent on ideological conquest, good deeds and the accumulation of cash. For all that heavy loading, Dooling ( Critical Care ) has constructed a deceptively simple story involving the disappearance in the African bush of Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps worker from Indianapolis whose father is a powerful wizard of the bankruptcy courts in the Seventh Circuit. A ``black bundle of tightly wrapped rags the size of a football,'' which has arrived at Randall Killigan's law office, eventually oozes blood and might be the cause of his bizarre nocturnal hallucinations. Calling on his considerable and well-compensated powers of analysis and suasion, Randall discovers that he is the recipient of African ``bad medicine.'' The State Department confirms that his son is missing. What follows is a journey far into the depths of African magic for the whereabouts of Michael Killigan. His boyhood friend, a not-always endearing naif named Boone Westfall, flies on a heroic rescue mission, only to further complicate the situation. Meanwhile, looking to buy answers, lawyer Killigan showers money and Land-Rovers into the African bush. Dooling's prose gifts are capacious: of a ``huge shirtless blacksmith'' working at a forge, he says ``he lifted something and the muscles of his back bloomed like the hood of a cobra.'' The book's language similarly expands to accommodate the bizarre and mind-bending mysteries of witchcraft upon which the plot turns. In the end, the book's lush satire cleverly obscures its simple, unarguable premise: that unfathomable rituals are at the heart of any culture, even in Indiana. (June)

Library Journal

Behind the fairly simple story of a Peace Corps volunteer missing in West Africa and a friend's search to find him, one feels that some larger significance is brooding and expects it to appear at any moment. Unfortunately, it never does. The pace is fast, the style lush, and the atmosphere slightly ominous; there is plenty of action, adventure, and suspense; but somehow Dooling has not quite managed to make it all come alive. The result has to be one of the longest shaggy-dog stories on record. The book would have been better if the author had curbed his tendency to overexpansiveness and exercised a little control of his material. A potentially good novel that does not quite make it.-A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston

Thomas Gaughan

Dooling's novel reads like two different books--both worthwhile and engaging. One is the story of Boone Westfall, a nice young Hoosier who travels to primitive, impoverished Sierra Leone in West Africa to search for his best friend, Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps volunteer who has disappeared. Boone's story is the oft-told tale of a white in black Africa who is slow to understand that his way isn't the only way. It's filled with vivid, authentic-sounding portraits of the harshness of life in the bush and of magic, witches, swears, and counterswears. The second story is a spectacularly wicked satire about bankruptcy lawyers, personified by the missing volunteer's father. Randall Killigan, Dooling tells us, has made his name "synonymous with commerical savagery in the Seventh Circuit" and has "less and less time for nonbankruptcy irritations and intrusions," like the disappearance of his son. One of Dooling's points, of course, is to make sure readers ask themselves, Who is the primitive?

Gary Krist

Impressive…sharply satiric.
—The New York Times Book Review

Richard Eder

A bravura display of satire…Dooling evokes the humane checks and balances of a deep world: the logic, you might say, of its magic.
—Los Angeles Times Book Review