Cowboys and Muslims: that’s the new global power struggle, according to the latest great American novel

‘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.