An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer

First published by Minotaur Books on March 13, 2012; reissued by Minotaur on March 3, 2020

An American Spy is the last novel in the Tourist trilogy, following The Tourist and The Nearest Exit. It could be read as a standalone, but doing so would deprive the reader of important context. This review includes spoilers concerning the second novel.

The trilogy follows Milo Weaver, who works as a Tourist for a small and very secret unit of the CIA. Tourists run around the world executing American policy by executing people whose interests do not align with American interests as judged by the people in charge of the Tourists. While they make other kinds of mischief, assassination is the key to their game.

Milo’s background — his Russian father is now running a spy agency for the United Nations, an agency so secretive that the United Nations doesn’t even know about it — is developed in The Tourist. In The Nearest Exit, Milo gets a new boss, Alan Drummond, and takes on Chinese spymaster Xin Zhu. Near the novel’s end, Zhu arranges for most of the Tourists to be murdered and for Milo to be shot.

An American Spy begins with Drummond losing his job. Drummond wants revenge against Zhu and would like Milo to join his team. When Milo says no, Drummond goes to London and then disappears. Not long after that, his wife disappears. And not long after that, Milo’s wife and daughter are gone. Milo assumes that they have all been taken by Zhu as a consequence of Drummond’s failed scheme.

Plot twists make An American Spy an engaging read, but the novel’s structure accounts for its success. While always told in the third person, the novel frequently shifts its focus, often backtracking to show events that were first perceived by one character from the perspective of a different character. In that way, the pieces of the jigsaw slowly rearrange to display a new picture, one that evolves as details are added until it becomes something quite different than it first seemed. Judging by Amazon and Goodreads reviews, a number of readers thought the changing perspectives were confusing. I thought they were the novel’s strength.

A German intelligence officer named Erica Schwartz, who plays a central role in The Nearest Exit, furnishes an early perspective in An American Spy. Milo’s sister and three surviving Tourists play important roles in the story (Letitia Jones, who exudes both sexuality and danger, also adds a bit of humor), but the perspective of Xin Zhu is the most interesting. Zhu is playing not only against Drummond and Milo, but against the Chinese government, which may have been infiltrated by an American spy. Zhu’s machinations make him seem invincible, capable of outwitting anyone. With Drummond and Milo apparently at each other’s throats, it seems that Zhu will attain supremacy in the international espionage game. Of course, the reader knows that a final plot twist will come along. The surprising resolution is a delight.

Olen Steinhauer is among the best of a very small number of American writers who consistently produce excellent espionage novels. While An American Spy wraps up the trilogy, it leaves room for the story to continue. Minotaur has reissued the trilogy, staggering the rerelease of each volume, leading up to the publication of a new installment later in March. Fans of spy fiction will welcome the return of Milo Weaver.

RECOMMENDED

The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao

First published in Australia in 2018; published by Atria Books on January 21, 2020

The Majesties is Crazy Rich Asians without the crazy. Or, at least, with a different kind of crazy. The Majesties lacks the humor of Kevin Kwan’s novel (and avoids the romantic cheese of the movie version). Instead, Tiffany Tsao purports to explore the impact of wealth on an extended Indonesian family. The Majesties is a family drama that descends into a very strange melodrama, but it takes an honest look at divisions caused by race and class in both Indonesia and America.

The story is told in the first person by Gwendolyn, who opens the novel with the revelation that her sister Estella murdered three hundred people, including herself, by poisoning their shark fin soup. Gwendolyn is the sole survivor. We later learn that this was not the first occasion on which Estella used poison to solve a problem, but Gwendolyn does not understand why her sister was motivated to wipe out so many people. The forced explanation that emerges at the end of the novel is far from convincing.

After the introductory mass murder, the novel backtracks to fill in the details of the narrator’s dysfunctional family. Estella and Gwendolyn are the granddaughters of Chinese tycoon Irwan Sulinado. The family conglomerate is based in Indonesia. Their business holdings involve textiles, agriculture, and mining, although various family members have branched out according to their interests and talents. Estella was put in charge of a profitable business that manufactures silk, although the business pretty much runs itself, leaving Estella free to live a life of fashionable frivolity. Gwendolyn founded a company called Bagatelle that makes jewelry from live insects, an idea that is sufficiently revolting to assure its success. The rest of the family is peeved that independent Gwendolyn refused to link her business to the family conglomerate.

Estella married Leonard, merging two prestigious families despite Leonard’s inability to meet the Sulinado standard of business management. His failure to turn a profit contributes to family conflict, as does his eventual decision to embrace Jesus and reject corruption (a decision that imperils family businesses that depend on corruption for their survival).

Additional family drama comes from Irwan’s remarriage to a younger woman “of humble stock” before his dead wife’s body was cold. The rest of the family treats the new grandmother as inconsequential, although she has the saving grace of being Chinese. The family insists on maintaining racial purity, despite the intermingling of a Javanese ancestor and a more recent half-Caucasian bride.

The plot moves to California when Estella and Gwendolyn discover a picture of a deceased aunt named Sandra. The picture was taken some years after the aunt’s supposed death. They decide to get to the bottom of the mystery by tracking her down.

The Majesties is refreshing in that it is not a “love conquers all” story. Sandra once studied in Australia, where she met a student from Jakarta. They began a friendship and potential romance until she discovered that, despite his physical appearance, the student was Javanese, not Chinese, and a Muslim to boot. The student resented the Chinese for their refusal to employ non-Chinese and resented his Chinese features because they impeded his hiring by Muslim employers. Still hoped to pursue the spark she felt, Sandra tries to stay in touch, but their subsequent encounters in Jakarta only gave her an opportunity to glimpse the lives lived by the city’s less fortunate residents. Thanks to Sandra’s father, friendship is difficult and romance is impossible. Sandra’s story approaches melodrama, but not nearly to the degree of Estella’s, who after all turns out to be a mass murderer.

The Majesties works best when it illuminates prejudice in circumstances that open the eyes of the privileged to the realities faced by the unfortunate. It is less successful when it chronicles the cruel dysfunctions of the Sulinado family. Gwenolyn learns that the family icons she has idolized are imperfect, but those lessons should have been apparent to her much earlier. Gwendolyn’s resolute independence is hard to square with her decision to maintain any relationship with her family at all. In any event, by the novel’s end, Gwendolyn cannot lay claim to a moral standard, making it difficult to care about her fate.

The novel’s themes will be familiar to fans of Dynasty and Dallas (Sandra’s disappearance being the dramatic equivalent of “Who shot J.R.?”). I watched Dallas as a guilty pleasure; The Majesties has a similar appeal. But just as Dallas eventually lost its way, so too the plot of The Majesties eventually derails. The climax requires the reader to rethink the story, but the sudden change of perspective is just too far over-the-top to be believable. The story steadily loses credibility, substantially offsetting its entertainment value, until it reaches a resolution that just doesn’t work. Dallas was at least meant to be cheesy; The Majesties has loftier aspirations that it never quite achieves.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Apartment by Teddy Wayne

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on February 25, 2020

Two young writing students have been accepted into Columbia’s MFA program. Billy, from a broken home in the Midwest, bartends evenings to pay his tuition. He lacks technical proficiency but he has a raw talent for telling honest stories and an ear for dialog. The novel’s narrator comes from a more privileged, East Coast background; his father is picking up his expenses. The narrator has a strong academic understanding of fiction, but he either lacks an artist’s soul or is incapable of allowing his soul to be reflected in his work. The reader will sense that the larger problem is the narrator’s lack of self-awareness. He is a lonely young man who does not understand the root of his loneliness.

The narrator is living illegally in his aunt’s rent-controlled apartment. After Billy is the only workshop student to praise the narrator’s work, the narrator offers to let Billy stay in the apartment’s second bedroom. Billy has been sleeping in the storage room in the bar that employs him and is grateful to have a nicer place to write. The two young men are quite different — Billy loves sports, the narrator loves Must See TV — but they strike up a strong friendship. The narrator spends most of his time with Billy, viewing him as the only real friend in a lonely life. When they party together, singing along to Oasis with others in a crowded bar, the narrator realizes “there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.” When he is sober, however, the future seems less promising.

The narrator observes Billy coming out of his shell over the course of the novel. While Billy is initially worried that he will appear as a hick to New Yorkers, his good looks and natural charm allow him to fit into any crowd, even when he despises most of the people he meets for their shallow pretentiousness. The narrator envies Billy because the narrator lacks the qualities that make Billy popular. Billy, in turn, resents the ease of the narrator’s life, his reliance on a father to pay expenses rather than doing “character building” labor to pay his own way. Billy has a midwestern tendency to judge anyone harshly who fails to meet his standards of authenticity.

When Billy and the narrator bring a pair of women to their apartment, they each take one to their respective bedrooms. For the narrator, the evening is unsatisfying. Combined with other clues, that encounter leaves the impression that the narrator might be in the closet. The novel’s pivotal point occurs on the next occasion Billy and the narrator pick up two women. During a drunken moment that may or may not be accidental (the narrator’s ability to distinguish accident from intent might not be reliable), Billy forms the obvious impression that the narrator is sexually attracted to him. That moment dissolves the male bond, at least from Billy’s perspective, and causes the narrator pain that leads to the story’s climax.

Well, okay. I get it. The narrator views himself as “fundamentally defective” but lacks insight into the cause of his self-loathing. The Apartment allows the reader to feel smug for understanding the narrator better than the narrator understands himself. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the story is meant to make the reader feel. I felt little empathy for the narrator’s struggle toward self-awareness, a struggle that continues to the novel’s end, given that he seems determinedly obtuse. The only true insight he reaches is that he is a better technician than a storyteller, the same thing he was told by everyone but Billy in his workshops.

Billy is something of a midwestern stereotype, a polite homophobe with low expectations who rails against elitism but tries to be fundamentally decent in an “aw shucks” way. While the narrator will always grapple with loneliness (unless and until he comes to understand why he is lonely), people will always gravitate to Billy; his initial insecurity about living in New York is an anomaly. Yet it is difficult to square Billy’s personality with his ability to write stories that appeal to Columbia MFA students. “I can’t be friends with someone who might be gay” is an incongruous attitude for the kind of writer who would earn praise at Columbia.

The Apartment struck me as something that the novel’s narrator might write. It is technically proficient but it lacks emotional resonance. The two key characters come across as literary creations rather than actual people, and the climax (like their relationship as a whole) struck me as artificial. Teddy Wayne’s technical proficiency suffices to make the reading experience at least partially satisfying, but when I finish a book and think nothing more than “Well, okay, I get it,” I can’t give the book a heartfelt recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Silent War by Andreas Norman

First published in Sweden in 2017; published in translation by Quercus on September 3, 2019

The Silent War differs from most espionage thrillers, in that it pits two allies against each other. Whether spy agencies should treat any nation as an ally, as opposed to a competitor to spy upon, is one of the book’s salient questions.

Betrayal is the constant theme of spy novels. Betrayal in the form of infidelity is central to The Silent War. Jonathan Green works for MI6 and is having an affair with Frances because their sex is so much better than he has with his wife Kate. Kate suspects Jonathan is seeing someone but she isn’t sure. As the station chief in Brussels, Jonathan has plenty of reasons to be secretive. One of his secrets involves Hercules, an operation proposed by Robert Davenport, head of the MI6 Middle East Department and Frances’ husband. There are leaks galore in the Brussels station, so Hercules will not be a secret for long.

The House in Turkey, near the Syrian border, is a part of Operation Hercules that even the Ministry of Defense doesn’t want to know about. Based on stolen documents, a Swedish intelligence operative named Bente Jensen learns that the Brits are using the House to interrogate prisoners in unlawful ways. That this comes as a shock to anyone in an intelligence service is hard to swallow, but MI6 is willing to go to any length to keep the House a secret, particularly from British politicians who might find it embarrassing.

Robert has a Clash of Civilizations mindset. Jonathan is more reasonable and therefore has reservations about the House, but he must retrieve the documents if he is to keep his job. Jonathan is also tasked with contacting an asset in Syria, a dangerous mission that would not have been assigned if Jonathan had kept it in his pants.

Meanwhile, Bente’s husband Fredrik, like Kate’s, is sleeping with another woman. It is no coincidence that the woman has turned her amorous attention to Bente’s husband, nor is it a coincidence that Bente’s mobile phone has been attacked by a virus. That attack adds to the institutional distrust of Bente, who (in the opinion of her superiors) exercised questionable judgment by accepting documents purloined from the British, potentially creating a diplomatic crisis. Bente is keeping the leaked documents in a safe in her home, which seems like an unprofessional place to stash top secret goodies.

British spies are part of the rich literary tradition of espionage novels. Swedes, not so much. The change of pace, coupled with the diplomatic difficulties of one European nation spying on another, is the most interesting aspect of The Silent War. The focus on cheating husbands and clandestine houses reserved for torture is more typical fare. The Silent War holds few surprises as it addresses those themes.

Characterization is not neglected, although the hand-wringing spouses of both genders who fret about their marriages again offer few surprises. The novel does have some stimulating action scenes near the end. Since they involve agents of friendly powers shooting at each other, they stretch the limits of plausibility. While The Silent War isn’t top shelf spy fiction, it does just enough to warrant its placement on a lower middle shelf, worthy of being consumed after better spy novels have been devoured.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

Published by Scribner on February 18, 2020

Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has reinvented himself as Danny, a self-employed house cleaner in Sydney. For four years, he has been “a brown man in a white man’s city.” Danny is Tamil but he has added golden highlights to his hair. The weirdness of his appearance appeals to Australians, or so he believes. Danny was a minority in Sri Lanka but he prefers Australia, where being “not like everyone else” earns respect.

Danny came to Sydney on a student visa, dropped out, and stayed in the country illegally. He finds it easy to become “invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway.” Danny works as a shelf stocker for an angry Greek shopkeeper. In exchange, he sleeps in a storeroom and gives the Greek half his earnings from cleaning jobs. Danny faces competition from Chinese and Nepali cleaners who offer more people on a team for the same hourly rate, but he scores clients by furnishing his own equipment; “a cleaner impresses with his autonomy.”

Danny is dating Sonja, an Asian whose accepting liberalism makes him comfortable. He has not told Sonja the real reason he can’t return to school or get a driver’s license. Nor does she know that he can’t get healthcare.

Those problems are common to undocumented migrants across the world, but Amnesty highlights a particular problem that has an impact not just on migrants, but on the societies in which they live. Many of the apartments Danny cleans are in the same vicinity. While cleaning one of them, he becomes aware that a crime was committed in another. A former cleaning client named Radha Thomas was murdered. He happens to know (and might be the only person who knows) that another client, a man named Prakash Wadhwa, was having an affair with Radha and had behaved violently toward her. Should he tell the police and risk deportation, or should he protect his own interest by allowing a possible killer to escape justice?

A just society, or even a society motivated by self-interest rather than prejudice, would reward a migrant who reports a crime by granting some form of amnesty. Deporting people who act in a country’s interest discourages undocumented migrants from doing the right thing. Even citizens who hate immigrants, citizens who are motivated by self-interest in the perceived struggle of “us” versus “them,” should be able to understand the logic of rewarding migrants who act in society’s interest rather than their own.

While Danny marvels at the justice system in Australia — a system considerably more just than Sri Lanka’s, were Danny was tortured for being Tamil — he knows that he will not be rewarded for contacting the police. He also knows that if he doesn’t, Prakash might flee the country, perhaps after killing Danny if Danny gives him that chance. Whether Danny will do the right thing under difficult circumstances — contact the police and risk deportation, tell the truth to Sonja and risk the end of their relationship — is the moral question that drives the plot.

The plot, however, is simply a vehicle to explore broader issues of social division. Aravind Adiga accomplishes that purpose with an observant view of Australian society. Danny perceives Sydney as divided between the thick bum suburbs, “where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves,” and the thin bum suburbs, “where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.” The thick bums resent immigrants and the thin bums exploit them, exchanging cash for labor without asking questions that might compromise the arrangement.

In Danny’s unflattering opinion, “Australians aren’t particularly bright. They don’t work hard. They drink too much.  So you tell me. Why are they so rich?” The answer, of course, is that average Aussies are rich only in comparison to average citizens of less fortunate nations. Wealthy nations prosper, in part, by taking advantage of developing nations. The unequal distribution of wealth and how that bears on the issue of undocumented migration is one of Adiga’s underlying themes.

But even the brown men in the city are divided by status. The “Western Suburbs Indians, smug in their jobs and Toyota Camrys,” the Australian-born children who look at Danny with “I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances,” the Malaysian tourists shopping for cholesterol medication. Since they are Danny’s color, they all see him, and they all look down on him. Hence the golden highlights in Danny’s hair, the insolent indifference with which he returns their stares, the futile attempt to make them think his status might be similar to theirs.

Adiga addresses these urgent themes with his usual ability to find humor in serious issues, although his use of humor — including the social division between thick and thin bums — is less overt than in White Tiger and Selection Day. Adiga portrays Danny not as a stereotype or even an archetype of an illegal immigrant, but as a unique individual who, unlike the illegals he knows, does not experience shame as “an atmospheric force, pressing down from the outside,” but as a force that “bubbled up from within.” His shame is connected to his past in Sri Lanka. He would feel it even if Australia made him a citizen. For that reason, Adiga is an uncommonly sympathetic character, one who deals not only with the external pressure of prejudice and the fear of deportation, but internalized anxiety about his self-worth. In the end, Danny must ask himself what kind of person he truly is.

Amnesty is not a thriller, despite some marketing that suggests it can be read as one. The plot is thin by thriller standards, the action is tepid, and the resolution is unsurprising. As a serious exploration of issues confronting immigrants who lose (or never acquire) their legal status, Amnesty delivers provocative questions rather than chase scenes.  Both in its dissection of pressing social problems and in its portrayal of a complex protagonist, Amnesty is another compelling work from Aravind Adiga.

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