Missile Paradise

April 11, 2016
The three close but not completely connected story lines in Tanner's latest novel center on the Marshall Islands after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., and the intersecting lives of the native Marshallese people and the Americans stationed there. Living on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean might sound like paradise, but the reality for Tanner's characters is a lot bleaker. The island nation is a place of post-colonial struggle, with 30% unemployment and one of the highest suicide rates in the world. As if nuclear warfare and global warming aren't threatening enough, cultural tensions between the Americans and the natives are getting worse. Cooper, a computer programmer assigned to work on nuclear defense systems, loses his leg in a freak sailing accident before his first day on the job. Alison, an alcoholic widow with two young sons, questions whether she will ever return to the U.S. while holding onto hope that the body of her drowned husband will eventually be found. Jeton is a teenage island native who feels his world has ended when his American girlfriend leaves him for college and a better future. Tanner (From Animal House to Our House) is at his best when depicting the very human flaws, obsessions, and prejudices his characters face, all against a vivid island background where summer never seems to end and social progress is at a standstill.

February 1, 2016
A chain of islands in the middle of the Pacific provides the backdrop for Tanner's (From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story, 2012, etc.) comic exploration of expatriate life and its consequences. In the 1950s, the U.S. used the Marshall Islands as a test site for nuclear bombs. Fifty years later, the Americans in Tanner's breezy tale are more self-destructive than anything, though their imprint on the island nation is hardly a net positive. For better or worse, they stick mostly to American-dominated Kwajalein, which "looks like a 1950s cinderblock beach town gone to seed" and houses the U.S. personnel who study missile defense at the nearby Ronald Reagan Test Site. Among the employees there is Cooper, who sails all the way from California for his new job but manages to lose a leg in the process. Alison, the art teacher at the Kwajalein high school, isn't much better off: she's coping with her husband's recent drowning, mostly by drinking her way through lunch. Then there's Art, a bedraggled former Peace Corps volunteer who married a native and now serves as "Cultural Liaison" to the expat community, explaining Marshallese customs while lobbing rhetorical grenades at American culture from afar. Meanwhile, the only Marshallese protagonist, Jeton, pines for his American girlfriend, Nora, who's preparing to return to the U.S. for college. Marshallese are banned from Kwajalein after nightfall, and Jeton's attempt to see Nora before she goes proves a crucial turning point in the plot. The themes here are major--global warming, imperialism, America's role in the world (the story is set soon after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal). But Tanner displays a light touch, favoring snappy dialogue over didacticism. The result is winning, though for some the novel may feel just a touch too lighthearted: at various points characters confront everything from alcoholism to catastrophic weather to sharks, but one gets the sense early on that, for the four major players, all will (mostly) work out in the end. A literary beach read that will keep you thinking after the vacation's over.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016
Tanner's high-adrenaline, piquantly funny, bad-to-worse novel is set in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958, subjecting the Marshallese to the unending consequences of nuclear fallout. It's 2004 at the start of this tale of cultural dissonance, hubris, anger, loss, and resiliency, and Cooper, a talented video-game programmer, is about to join a missile-defense group on the island of Kwajalein, a military stronghold on which Marshallese are not allowed after dark. But he has a freak accident after sailing alone across the Pacific from California, following a rift with his fiancee, and begins his stay on Kwajalein in rehab after losing a leg. A bizarre diving mishap has left Alison widowed with two young sons. Jeton, an impulsive Marshallese teenager jilted by his American girlfriend, propels himself into deep trouble. And Art, the flinty cultural liaison, fights discrimination against the Marshellese. In this poisoned island paradise besieged by poverty, disease, and rising sea levels precipitated by global warming, each irresistibly self-embattled character makes grievous mistakes, suffers from regret, and plunges into disaster. Tanner (From Animal House to Our House, 2012), who lived in the Marshall Islands and launched the Marshall Islands Story Project, brings this microcosm of human folly and valor to captivating realization with bracing insights, tangy humor, profound respect, and rebounding resonance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)