Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse
Revered for his essays, most recently collected in Sex and the River Styx (2011), Hoagland is also an intrepid fiction writer. In his newest novel, a work of throttling intensity, he draws on his extensive sojourns in Africa to portray Hickey, an American schoolteacher improvising a “knockabout” life as a “guide, ne’er-do-well, aid worker, what-have-you” in central Africa. A pragmatist, Hickey smuggles diamonds and gold as he tries to help destitute people starving in the vise of civil war and brutality beyond comprehension. Tough and impish Ruth Parker runs an isolated, overwhelmed clinic and refuses to give up even after being abducted and possibly raped. The two reach out warily to each other within the maelstrom of famine, torture, genocide, disease, and corruption, struggling to rescue a group of traumatized and doomed children against surreal adversity. The ferocious lucidity of Hoagland’s language and the depth of his characters as they navigate political complexity, hellish violence, endless fear, persistent desire, and desperate calculations of survival make for a shattering tale of epic suffering, bitter irony, and miraculous flashes of beauty. --Donna Seaman