Tea of Ulaanbaatar

February 7, 2011
It's youthful idealism gone wild in Howard's striking debut. Part of the eighth Peace Corps team ever granted access to Mongolia, Warren is stationed in a "cursed" late 1990s Ulaanbaatar, working as a teacher and killing time with his somewhat unhinged group of Peace Corps cohorts; there are "five of them and nine hundred thousand Mongols." When he's not busy obsessively washing his hands—40 to 50 times "on a bad day"—or dreaming of his college girlfriend, Padma, Warren takes up with Subdaa, a bad-news Mongolian he soon accompanies on a bender. Despite warnings, the pair starts experimenting with tsus, a highly addictive blood-red tea that inspires fanatical devotion and some serious delusions. Howard's tight and witty writing gives spry life to what could otherwise be a ho-hum stranger-in-a-strange-land kind of tale. His characters are well developed, and Warren, despite his moral decay, is easy to root for and—hallucinations withstanding—a reliable guide. Though the large chunks of drug-induced rambling could have easily been pruned, the energetic prose pushes the story along at a healthy clip, even when, as Warren's co-worker says, "It's always saddening to see this, when a foreigner loses his way in Ulaanbaatar."

March 15, 2011

A National Magazine Award finalist for a short story he published in McSweeney's, Howard spent several months in Mongolia on an aborted Peace Corps mission. If his first novel is anything like the truth, perhaps the entire Peace Corps mission should be aborted. Since Warren can't get a job with his journalism degree, he up and volunteers for the Corps, landing with only the eighth team granted access to Mongolia. He's supposed to be teaching English, but the only class we see Warren conduct is decidedly downbeat; he seems to spend most of his time in desultory socializing. Warren keeps dreaming of Padma back home, trying to recall the poem she told him never to forget, yet he gets involved with a local named Subdaa. She introduces him to tsus, the blood tea--a powerful narcotic that, says one wily Mongolian with reference to the ugly Americans, "will corrupt the corrupters." Soon Warren is caught up in plans to smuggle tsus out of the country, with understandably unhappy results. VERDICT This is an accomplished novel with a keen sense of atmosphere and description, but with its disaffected tone and unpleasant characters it will be too sour for many readers to swallow.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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