The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson

I crossed the frontier from Costa Rica in the south, down from the cool hills, through the soggy checkpoints, and right into the factory of bugs in the towering grass this side of the border, bugs raining down through the air, a perpetual cloud of them overshadowing the Lago de Nicaragua so that they cake, absolutely putty--I'm talking about bugs--all these leprous diesel-spewing vehicles trying to crawl through the choking deluge... I don't know at what point, maybe it's as you pass the second or third miserable sugar refinery looking like a prison, that you realize you've been ejected from Paradise. And whatever these stunned, drenched people did to get themselves banished here is an absolute mystery. Like your own mortal error...

The narrator of Denis Johnson's The Stars at Noon is an American in Nicaragua during the time of the conflict between the ruling Sandinistas and the U.S.-backed contras. She claims at one point to be connected to an organization called for "Eyes for Peace," and at another point to be a journalist, though when she calls her publication, it seems to be a two-bit fashion magazine that has no interest in Nicaragua, or, frankly, her. Professionally, the most that can be said about her for certain is that she is a prostitute, picking up various men for favors or money. One of these is a pasty Englishman who turns out to be in a lot of hot water for divulging oil business secrets to a neighboring government. In an uncharacteristic fit of empathy, and perhaps because she has fallen for him in a way that only makes sense as the exception that proves the rule of her own hardened heart, she seeks to help him, but she's a poor helper, being in hot water herself: she desperately needs someone to exchange her Nicaraguan money for U.S. dollars, the only currency that can pay for a way out of Nicaragua.

Johnson once said something to the effect of, "I am Graham Greene" (I dunno, look it up), a sentiment that makes little sense of all you've read of him are Angels or Jesus' Son. But this book really is Johnson in Greene mode, a la The Laughing Monsters or the Vietnam sections of Tree of Smoke, thick in the middle of a foreign crisis where intelligence is always shifting and any given person may be an ally or an enemy. Johnson is really good in this mode, and his books capture something of the inherent uncertainty of espionage, where nothing is ever truly revealed and even your own motivations are somehow concealed. The pair of lovers in The Stars at Noon are really fucked, because neither of them knows what they are doing, and any shrewdness or spark of insight they exhibit pales, we see, in comparison to the forces that wish to punish the Englishman for his corporate transgressions. I was reminded not only of Greene but of another writer who wrote about Americans adrift in banana republics, Joan Didion.

The Stars at Noon is no Tree of Smoke, and I thought it wasn't quite a Laughing Monsters, either, but it succeeds on the strength of the voice of the main character: bitter, desperate, sarcastic, fatalistic. We never really learn what it is she's doing there or how she got there, but it's easy to buy her as a two-bit schemer whose guile conceals a fundamental waywardness. The central romance, if that's what it is, works because it seems so improbable, and the two are so ill-matched; the Englishman (as he's called) is as reserved and buttoned-up as she is uncouth. Somehow they seem to complement each other, and not just because they are both in desperate straits. The novel moves from Managua to the pair's attempt to escape to the Costa Rican border, and it seems they know as well as the reader does that they are only hurtling toward their own doom. Johnson's Nicaragua is a chaotic mess, a literal hell as the narrator describes it, but as a failed state it seems only to match the inner life of the narrator.