Review: Intriguing without even a hint of intrigue
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 22, 2011
Sliced, diced and cubed - after spending most of his life abroad teaching English (Mexico, Peru, Japan, Saudi Arabia) Paul Tregwynt, 53, is back in the United States where he now inhabits a nondescript cube in a gray, windowless D.C.-area high-rise while working as a translator for a intelligence agency, a spook house, three Metro stops past the Pentagon.After almost a lifetime as a foreigner in strange lands, he now feels more of an alien than he ever did overseas. He is surrounded by geeky nobs, members of the spy community who play cloak-and-dagger by giving false names when ordering out for pizza.The spies in this romp of a story spend more time playing computer solitaire and cutting up with a Nerf ball than they do spying. There's a saying where he works that, "You can spot the extroverts here because they look at your shoes instead of theirs." Tregwynt wonders if the War on Terror is one waged between opposing sides of nitwits.Tregwynt who is six feet, five inches long spends hours and hours of his free time scootched into a too-small bathtub thinking and reading but mostly reading  short stories in French or more recently Russian novels foisted upon him by his super-geek team leader Wayne Mullenbach. For Tregwynt, the bathtub is as warm and soothing as a womb. Reading in the tub for him is transporting, "This is my real life. All the rest is fiction."Books, especially obscure Russian novels, also are a big part of his bosses' life. Whether he reads them or simply has them around for display isn't really certain. The Russian novels give boss and translator an odd connection.The boss brings in the books and hands them to the translator with a firm directive: read this book. Translator reads and returns the book to have it replaced with an equally obscure Russian text the following day in a repeating pattern that reminded me in a vague way of the same type off kilter office behavior in Melville's classic short story "Bartelby the Scrivener."Tom Rachman's debut novel "The Imperfectionists" was a huge success and for me it struck a note of melancholy. "Bathtub Spy" has its share of comic rifts but like his novel the tone is more bleak than upbeat. It is in its own way wistful but with some laughs thrown in to round things out.In a few pages Rachman develops strong characters in his two protagonists; their characterizations and oddball similarities are what give this Kindle short its kick. It's a story about spies without a hint of espionage. It's a story built around a lack of intrigue, and in a way that's what makes it so intriguing.