Disturbing the Peace Corps

Interreligious strife, poverty, witchcraft, disease-this does not seem like the stuff of comedy. For that matter, the cultural isolation of an NGO worker living in an African village does not sound like an especially lighthearted premise for a book. Yet the most surprising aspect of Tony D'Souza's first novel, Whiteman, is that it combines these admittedly depressing topics in a narrative that, for all its flaws, is consistently witty and engaging.

Presumably based on the author's own experiences as a member of the Peace Corps, the novel follows the exploits of Jack Diaz, a young American relief worker who continues volunteering in an Ivory Coast village despite a lack of funding and mounting political instability. As the country's Muslim and Christian factions square off in "colonization's hangover civil war," Jack takes shelter in the rural solitude and recounts his life among the Muslim villagers.

Jack's memories unfold in roughly chronological order, from his training among fellow members of Potable Water International to his gradual acclimation to village life. D'Souza peppers his story with many vignettes that focus on the cultural divide between Jack and the people he's trying to help. These misunderstandings usually result from the language barrier that causes Jack to misinterpret the locals-whether he refuses their offering of a young girl for sexual relief or is mistaken for a ghost in the forest. D'Souza uses such passages to showcase his gift for broad comic humor, and it's to his credit that this plot device rarely comes across as trite, even if it wears thin over the course of 279 pages.

The story's penchant for comedy is offset by its frank assessment of the difficulties facing Africa today. Whiteman never shies away from depicting the hardships-self-inflicted or otherwise-that make death and disease fixtures of village life. At the same time, Jack's status as a foreigner ("The whiteman! Le blanc!") allows D'Souza to analyze the rift between affluent Westerners and impoverished Africans. The tone of his writing never borders on polemical, but the author makes his political views clear by painting Jack as the exception to Western apathy. This theme is developed in the novel's second half, when Jack's growing disappointment with his job causes him to worry that his efforts are meaningless in the grand scale of world events. Fortunately for the reader, D'Souza is not just indulging in globalized angst. Instead he offers a realistic portrait of the problems, both ideological and practical, that perpetuate hardship in the Third World and frustrate the good intentions of NGO workers like Jack.

Given its deft synthesis of comedy and political realism, Whiteman is an ambitious and entertaining read. That said, it suffers from a few deficiencies-a hurried pace between chapters, too much self-awareness, and an underdeveloped title character-that limit its success as a piece of literature. More problematic, though, is that D'Souza often says too little when one wishes he would say more. Perhaps if he had expanded the story by a few hundred pages, his reach would not have exceeded his grasp. As it stands, his novel is an odd mix of insight and superficiality, somewhere between What Is the What and White Men Can't Jump.