Holy Water
| Holy Water | |
| James P. Othmer | |
| Anchor (2009) | |
| Rating: | **** |
| Tags: | madmaxau, General Fiction |
Henry Tuhoe is the quintessential twenty-first-century man. He has a vague, well-compensated job working for a multinational conglomerate. He has a beautiful wife and an idyllic home in the suburbs. But things change when Henry’s boss offers him a choice: go to the tiny, about-to-be-globalized Kingdom of Galado to oversee the launch of a new customer-service call center for a bottled water company, or lose the job with no severance, Henry takes the transfer. Once in Galado, a land both spiritual and corrupt, Henry wrestles with first-world moral conundrums, the attention of a megalomaniacal monarch, and a woman intent on redeeming both his soul and her country.
The latest from Othmer (
The Futurist
) reads like a very contemporary
Heart of Darkness
run through the satire blender. Longtime company man Henry Tuhoe has a self-absorbed wife who is learning witchcraft and pressuring him to have a vasectomy; he's increasingly alienated from his friends, and is forced to decide between getting fired or accepting a new position opening a call center in an obscure Third World country called Galado. So he takes the job. That the call center doesn't have working telephones or employees who can speak English are just a couple of Henry's concerns in a plot that bounces between everyday realism and the absurd. His new workplace is as morally and spiritually corrupt as the corporate culture back home, and Henry makes it his personal humanitarian mission to help provide clean water to Galado's poorest citizens. Othmer wrings humor from nearly every facet of contemporary culture, with many of the most comical moments taking place in brief anecdotes (as with a Gulf War I re-enactor). It's well-done satire—dark, but not too—in the vein of Gary Shteyngart and early Colson Whitehead.
(June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Former adman Othmer follows his memoir, Adland (2009), with his second novel. Henry Tuhoe, vice president of underarm research for an antiperspirant maker, is paralyzed by self-doubt after an ill-advised move to the suburbs. Then his department is eliminated and he’s transferred to the tiny kingdom of Galado on the Indian-Chinese border, where he’s to oversee a call center for a Vermont-based bottled-water company. Unfortunately, Galado’s own water is a toxic stew, and, ironically, plastic bottles are forbidden. Worse, the country is a kleptocracy run by a steroid-crazed prince whose grandiose dreams of multinational investment are threatened by popular rebellion. Othmer is a sharp and intelligent writer, offering scathing takes on the realities of global commerce and the myopia of wealthy nations. But he’s frustrating, too. The book opens with a piece of bravura absurdity—a corporate outing on a burning river—but never quite regains that intensity. When it comes to novelistic housekeeping, he’s too conservative and the story loses momentum. It’s a good book. But, one suspects, if Othmer went truly gonzo, he might write something great. --Keir Graff
~ * ~
Holy Water
James P.
Ot
hmer
No copyright 
201
3
by MadMaxAU eBooks
~ * ~
Riverfire
The river is burning down.
Or is it up? The river is burning up. More than a hundred feet up. And since his boat is upwind from the night-burning pit furnaces to the south and stars are shining defiantly in a sky that rarely allows them to and the white-tipped lesser Himalayas loom on either side of the valley to the east and west, he thinks that this is a disturbingly beautiful thing. This riverfire.
They didn
’
t tell him about this phenomenon at the executive briefing in Manhattan. The exit interview at the home office. Nowhere in the Winning Business Abroad Six Sigma PowerPoint presentation does he recall hearing anything about a body of water consumed by flame.
All they told him was,
In this economy, be thankful you have a
freakin
’
job.
His groin aches. The epicenter of phantom pains. The k
a
rmic vortex. The fleshy receptacle of damaged memories. Formerly known as his testicles.
The fire is highest where debris collects in the crooked river
’
s bend.
He is a big believer in the symbolic weight of what song is playing at a particular moment. And if a song isn
’
t playing, he will assign a song to the moment and force the symbolism, revel in the false epiphany. His suggested sound track
f
or this moment would be Spoon
’
s
“
The Beast and the Dragon Adored.
”
“
That
’
s beautiful. Is it some kind of welcome ceremony organized by the villagers?
”
he asks, even though he knows that this isn
’
t some kind of
welcome ceremony organized by the villagers. He knows that the river up here was coated with a black skin of waste that was waiting to burn. Daring someone to light the match.
L
ike what? The Cuyahoga. Near Cleveland in 1969. He is too young to remember the actual fire but not too young to get his history from R.E.M.
’
s
“
Cuyahoga.
”
This is where we walked, this is where we swam . . .
“
It is not a ceremony,
”
explains his corporate liaison/host/executioner.
“
It is toxic, this river.
”
The man waves at the flaming water as if it is a hyperkinetic child.
“
Sometimes it does that.
”
Henry and the corporate liaison exchange a glance that signals a transition in their relationship. The end of bullshit. Previously the liaison had told him that a pro-democracy demonstration in the capital city was a birthday celebration for the king, that the black
ash
that fell
like nightmare snow on Shangri-L
a Square was volcanic, and that his country was a human rights champion despite the fact that it still hasn
’
t abolished slavery.
Let
’
s put our heads together, start a new country up . . .
He sees this as a bad thing, this sudden telling of the truth. He decides that the end of bullshit means they no longer care what he thinks. His hosts. His corporate partners. The diminished bureaucrats of a fading monarchy. Because someone to whom they have decided to tell the truth is obviously someone who no longer matters. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the Madison Avenue PR exec brought in to work the same spin magic her firm did for the Beijing Games staring at her out-of-service iPhone and quietly weeping.
He decides to give the corporate liaison another chance to lie. To help matters, he even spells out the premise of the lie for him.
“
Maybe there was,
you know, an accident. A tanker spill or a factory mishap. Perhaps the Chinese
...
”
The liaison shakes his head, lights an American cigarette.
“
No,
”
he answers.
“
Even rivers burn. This one. . . toxic, twenty four seven.
”
Cuyahoga, gone . . .
No one told him about any of this. No one told him about the corruption, the poverty, the
malaprop
billboard in the half built
“
Free Zone
”
touting
“
Quality Manufactured Gods.
”
No one told him that the
nonparty
constitutional democracy to which he was being extra-sourced was actually an unhinged monarchy which is, when the UN and Amnesty International aren
’
t looking, a dictatorship. No one told him about the delusional, profit- and Bollywood-obsessed despot in waiting. And no one told him that his five-star
“
spiritual eco-lodge
”
with a private bathing garden, infinity pool, and extensive spa menu was also a whorehouse that sat on a hilltop less than a mile from a water-challenged village with one occasionally working pump that tapped into an aquifer of the most polluted and, as it turns out, flammable river on the planet.