‘I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.’ When ‘The Bumper Book of American Foreign Policy’ gets written, General James Mattis’s line to Iraqi leaders after the 2003 invasion will be an obvious choice for the cover blurb, but meanwhile it makes a striking epigraph to Bob Shacochis’s furious, sprawling novel about a half-century of US espionage and powerbroking. Like Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, Don DeLillo’s Libra and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, this is the spy story tricked out as the great American novel, vaulting over the conventions of the cloak-and-dagger genre in dogged pursuit of larger questions of the national heart and mind.
That said, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul has its share of disguises, war zones, gunfights, shipwrecks and back-from-the-dead voodoo stunts as well. The book begins in Haiti in 1998 as Tom Harrington, an American human rights lawyer, is lured back to the island to help investigate a woman’s murder. Haiti is familiar territory for Shacochis, who as a journalist covered the military coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the subsequent US invasion, and the chapters of the book set in its ‘landscape of ruination’ among resentful aid workers and grumbling hacks (‘the more cynical among them muttering that the country was too fucked even to throw a good war’) are some of its strongest.
‘Of course, it was not a simple homicide, because it was Haiti,’ Shacochis writes; and when Harrington realises that he knew the dead woman years before under another name, the first of the book’s many narrative switchbacks begins. This is also the point at which Shacochis’s gigantic, complicated novel really begins to resist summary. One of the narrative strands follows the upbringing and adult life of Jackie Scott, aka Dottie Chambers, a stunning blonde (‘I think you are the girl in the American comic book,’ suggests one character in broken English.
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