Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can't always do it while it's happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by Americans. Us, and the American government, which ran the Nicaro nickel mine. Batista was persona non grata with the Cubans, and we were caught in the middle. Fidel and Raul, these were local boys, and I think Daddy was hoping he could reason with them.

Rachel Kushner's debut novel Telex from Cuba captures the lives of Americans living in Cuba as the civil war broke out in the 1950s. They come from all walks of life: they're rich, like K. C. Stites, whose father runs one of the plantations of the United Fruit Company, or middle-class, like Everly Lederer, whose father comes down to serve as a manager there. Even the lower classes are able to get in on the exploitation of Cuba's resources, like Allain Hatch, who finds a haven in Cuba away from the laws of the United States, where he's wanted for a killing. To these characters Kushner adds a real-life French arms runner named La Maziere, and a beautiful prostitute--conspicuously named "Rachel K"--who is reputed to be Batista's favorite, but who is really in league with Maziere and the rebels. All of these characters have their role to play in the revolution, whether rebel or victim, and all have their lives upended by the sea change that transforms Cuba.

Telex from Cuba is scrupulously researched, finely detailed, and boring. I thought it bore the hallmarks of a debut novelist's pitfalls: there's too much research, for one, not sifted through enough to give a singular impression. There are too many characters and too many points-of-view: K. C. gives a first person account, rife with patrician resentment at the loss of his birthright, but Everly, La Maziere, and many others get their turn in the third person limited seat, including about a dozen white-collar Americans and their wives whose roles in the novel I found difficult to get straight. Any one of these might have made a good novel--I thought this particularly about the irony in K. C.'s first person narration--but on the whole, they turn into a real mash. Things that ought to be huge, like the Stites' family's son Del joining the rebels, recede into the background in favor of images and symbols of dubious importance, like an abandoned Pullman railway car.

I rather enjoyed The Mars Room, which pulls some of the same point of view tricks, but without feeling overstuffed or encouraging impatience. Maybe the fact that it's mostly set in prison--a naturally confining space--helped. But this one didn't work for me.