Book Review: Detours
Detours. Emma Gates. Wells Street Press, January 15, 2014, Trade Paperback.
Reviewed by Vicky Edwards.
Detours is a book that bridges the changing times, and the changing world, from the political protests at Indiana University in the early 1970s to political unrest in Kuwait in 1983, focusing on the uneasy relationship between love and politics.
The story begins in 1983 with the protagonist, Clare, scanning a list of people she will see at an upcoming trade show. She sees the name of Lowell Goodenow, triggering an extended flashback to her meeting Lowell when she was an idealistic freshman co-ed and Lowell was a self-assured East Coast upperclassman. Sparks fly, both political and personal, but when Clare is involved in a political activity Lowell doesn’t support, their relationship is tested.
The social unrest of the intervening years unfolds before us: civil unrest in Mexico, a bombing in Beirut, the Iranian revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Gates has a good eye for vivid details and a good ear for the language of the times. Guitarists strum to Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens, the Establishment is dissed, and bras go unworn. The descriptions of time and place ring true, although they are, in the end, backdrop for the romance of the two central characters.
The title refers to the detours the characters make before reconnecting in 1983, but more generally, to the way we try to create a path our lives will take when we are in college only to find a decade later that the path took far different turns than we could possibly have envisioned.
There are times when the detailed descriptions of characters and their settings overwhelm to the point that they are less human and engaging people than they might be, but overall the book is readable and, at times, even poetic. The opening page, for example, depicts an icy December sky in Chicago that is “spitting white dots and dashes” and later, Lowell looks at hills in autumn “where gold and scarlet were just staining the leaves.”
Gates knows the backdrops she has described in the novel well, having attended college in Bloomington, Indiana, and having worked in both Mexico and Saudi Arabia. She earned an MBA with a concentration in Arabic/Middle East studies and now lives in the Chicago area.