A Puzzle that Becomes an Obsession

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman A few months at the end of the 1950s proved drastically significant for wholly insignificant Kurash...

...That may disappoint readers who like their mysteries to be cleanly solved in the final pages, but it is the ironic heart of the novel and, the historian learns, an irony of history...

...contradictory versions are piled on and he cannot sort out the real story from the cover stories...

...What this assignment meant is a puzzle that becomes an obsession for the adult Terry...

...He plunges into CIA documents, memories of one-time Cold Warriors, and the intricate plots and complots of the King's presumed friends, foes and lovers...

...But the victory is short-lived and assassination looms...

...The book perks up when Bromell digs into Kurashian history and into the history of the real-life Americans who, for a period, ran that imaginary little country...

...I found myself growing impatient as Terry rambled on about his thoroughly uninteresting youthful companions while the King's fate is in the balance...

...Is the father betraying both him and, incidentally, his real son...

...As evidence or seeming evidence accumulates, Terry finds himself increasingly perplexed about the big question that torments him: Was his father one of the good guys or one of the bad guys...

...Since the British Empire is no longer able to support him, the job falls to America and to Mack, who hands over a monthly supply of dollars...

...Terry Hooper, the narrator of Little America, recounts the events early on: In December 1958 the 23-year-old King of the small country "wedged between the eastern border of Jordan, the rump of Syria, and the southwestern corner of Iraq" was killed, and shortly afterward Kurash vanished from the region's maps...

...It was a world of spies, then, spies and their Vassar wives with big smiles and healthy white teeth and red lipstick and packs of cigarettes, spies and their bowls of Miltowns and shakers of very dry gin Martinis...

...To know our secrets is his Holy Grail...

...Terry quickly discovers how much help the King needed, beset as he was by Arab factions from Nasserite Leftists to Muslim fundamentalists to Palestinian nationalists determined to bring him down...

...On an illadvised car trip into a refugee camp, Terry's mother finds herself in a Middle Eastern nightmare: "a pile of tiny shacks made from bits and pieces of plywood and plastic and tin signs and oil drums split open and spread into warped rectangles, children with swollen brown bellies swarming around the car with outstretched begging hands, high-pitched voices chattering incomprehensibly, like insane sewing machines, big dark eyes peering at her with desperate curiosity through the dusty window...

...spies who answered the call to duty, spies who answered the call to adventure...

...At a funeral for one of them, Terry, our historian, reflects that he was witnessing the end of "that specific midcentury American upper-middle-class Wasp East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, I guess, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby...

...When Bromell gets down to the promised assassination, things become less plausible, more romantic, more hectic as if the event was being acted out by the toy soldiers that excited Terry's youthful imagination...

...When he was 10 the entire momentous episode had been remote...

...Where he falters is in his plotting...

...When the wind shifted to the east, it brought with it the amber dampness of Iraqi marshes, too ripe, spoiling, the harsh, pitiless decadence of the Tigris and Euphrates, plump pomegranates spilling their glistening seeds upon the sand...

...Who will be the assassin...

...Their role in our national theater had all ended with their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...

...Ever the spy, even in retirement, Mack evades Terry's questions, and what he does say cannot be trusted...

...The enduring and provoking mystery, however, is what Mack was doing when Terry was growing up in what he calls his "miniature Levittown in the desert...

...One of the various brands of Arab fanatic or an American...

...Bromell fills in the gaps with plenty of atmosphere, though, both Middle Eastern and expatriate suburban: "As full spring grew closer, riper, a moist heaviness came in on the desert air, like a hint of the distant Mediterranean far across the Kurashian plains, the craggy hills of northern Lebanon, cedars rooted to rock that once looked down upon the red sails of Phoenician boats...

...That proves the King's most heroic hour...

...The answers get complicated...

...The spooks' strings were controlled by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, who put in cameo appearances now and then as masterminds hunkered down to fight the Cold War and win it...

...All plots converge on the King...

...Despite an image or two that seem to have been borrowed from television reports (those swollen bellies and big dark eyes), Bromell can be arewarding stylist...

...Can he be the King's parental surrogate, Mack...

...But the American connection only agitates the King's enemies and soon rebellion is afoot...

...America's conspiratorial cadres live out their suburban family lives as though they were mere clerks with nothing more on their consciences than cultivating their small garden plots, while vast plots were unfolding around them and enfolding them...

...he was in Kurash because his father, Mack, was a CIA agent whose main assignment was to be the young King's best friend, adviser, supporter, manipulator, and exploiter...

...in briskly written passages, he defeats the traitors...

...The historian finds himself befuddled by what happened and how it happened...

...Although his picture of the strangely subversive suburban existence in Little America is persuasive, his depiction of Terry's adolescence, with its stirrings of early sex, gets in the way of the really fun stuff, the Middle East conspiracies and counterconspiracies...

...The rush of solutions at the climax leaves Terry little more clear-sighted than he was at the start...

...They had started the CIA as a place of clarity and focus in confusing and tumultuous times...

...It has been 27 years since Bromell published his first novel, The Follower, which held promise of good work to come...

...Even the less original descriptions carry us vividly into the Americans' guilty mission...

...He's my father...

...Henry Bromell's evocation of the Cold War reveals Terry's conventionally revisionist persuasion: "Rheumy Episcopalians from Yale and Wall Street held sway, projecting onto the world their own vision of churchly virtue versus the godless unwashed hordes...

...For as Terry perseveres in making sense out of fragments that may contain something of the truth or be merely the kind of cover stories Mack is trained to devise, all parties turn out to be conspirators of some sort...

...Forty years later Terry, now a 50-yearold historian, begins digging into the tangled past...

...He's a spy...

...He's an intelligence officer...

...The novel moves smoothly forth and back between the 1990s and the 1950s...

...The belated Little America fulfills expectations: This is an intelligently imagined combination spy thriller, geopolitical drama and elegy to an innocent childhood lived amid adults whose jobs entailed heavy burdens of guilt...

...Cigarettes, identified by brand—Chesterfields, Camels, Salems—help the author recapture the time, along with those martinis (though practically anything liquid will do), and the recordings of Sinatra and the young Elvis...

...Terry's question about his father, whether he was one of the good guys or the bad guys, proves to be unanswerable because his father himself, like the rest of America, could never be sure...