We've experienced a total computer failure here at Chez TEV - complete crash, hard drive toast, system unbootable. Fortunately, we have key files backed up but it's going to take us a day or two to get fully replaced and rebuilt so posting might be sparse. Also, if you've emailed in the last three or four weeks and are still awaiting an answer, best to resent as we have lost a month or so of most recent emails. In the meantime, thanks to Daniel Olivas for stepping in with this timely guest review.
Dirt Cheap: A Novel
By Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Curbstone Press 370 pp. (paperback)
GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS
Lyn Miller-Lachmann has dedicated her life to promoting multicultural literature in the hope that readers of all ages will learn to appreciate and admire those who come from different cultures. She also has been active in human rights, social and environmental justice, and peace groups since the mid-1970s.
She could easily rest on her laurels and call it a day.
But she now brings us her first novel, Dirt Cheap (Curbstone Press). In it, as with her other work, Miller-Lachmann does not shy away from tough questions of what we, as a people, are doing to our planet and to each other. And she does so with crisp dialogue and fully realized characters.
The heart of this novel is the relationship between Nicholas Baran and Sandy Katz. Baran, who was raised in a scrapyard by an alcoholic father, is now deep into middle age and teaching at a community college, but with an anger toward life's injustices that drives him to radical politics and a brilliant, junkyard-dog intensity in the classroom. His anger helps him survive chemotherapy as he wrestles leukemia into remission. Baran is a handful for his wife and children, but they more or less allow him to live his radicalized life.
Katz, on the other hand, is young and not yet jaded. She teaches at the local middle school and has Baran's son in her class. Katz struggles with her independence from her parents and her desire to reconnect with Judaism. She also is failing miserably as a teacher. So when she's tapped to coach the "B" team in basketball -- which includes Baran's son -- she accepts the opportunity to burnish her teaching record.
Baran agrees to assist Katz in coaching, which leads to some of the novel's most interesting interaction between the world-weary rabble-rouser and the idealistic neophyte. But something more brings Baran and Katz together: There is an alarming rate of cancer among the children in the community. Baran already suspects corporate crimes and has been conducting soil and water samples, much to the consternation of his wife, Holly, and Marc Braxton, a local attorney who is concerned that Baran's quest could be disastrous to real-estate values and business.
Baran and Katz eventually join forces to uncover hard evidence of the intentional contamination of their community's soil and water by the Hometown Chemical Co. Miller-Lachmann kicks her narrative into high gear as we watch this odd couple search for the truth. The novel succeeds beyond this "eco-thriller" aspect of the story because Miller-Lachmann imbues her characters with all the strengths and weaknesses that we see in those we love and know. And because Baran and Katz are so well-drawn, we eventually care for them -- despite their personal failings -- and cheer them on as they attempt to reveal the cause of the cancer clusters.
Dirt Cheap is an enthralling novel that raises complex questions about how we treat each other as well as the environment in which we live. Miller-Lachmann can now add "novelist" to her long list of literary accomplishments.
Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books, including Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press, 2004). He is the editor of Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, forthcoming from Bilingual Press in 2007. His Web site is www.danielolivas.com, and he blogs each Monday on La Bloga. This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.