cover image Happy Talk

Happy Talk

Richard Melo. Red Lemonade (PGW, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-935869-17-7

Melo’s ambitious new novel (after Jokerman 8), spanning five decades of the Atomic Age, is the story of spies, nurses-in-training, and propaganda artists in Haiti in the 1950s, where the U.S. government’s interests were complicated and varied. The State Department runs a special school to train nurses for a nuclear attack and has commissioned a bored film crew to produce a surfing film to promote tourism, though there are never any waves. In a dazzling scene that invokes Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a ragtag team of inventors test balloon-transported houses. The first two-thirds of the book are held together by a love story between a member of the film crew named Culprit Clutch and a morphine-addicted nurse, though we get the richest sense of Culprit through the hormone-addled gossip of the young cloistered nurses. We later see Culprit filming the Carerra Panamericano in Mexico, a deadly, short-lived road race that Melo renders in riveting prose. In the decades that follow, anonymous voices enthuse over Culprit’s “extraordinary” film, which, via various underground screenings, was mistaken by authorities for a “Mexican stag film or a cockfight.” Even if the novel’s temporal and narrative threads don’t quite tie together, Melo is a great spinner of yarns through polyphonic hearsay. Agent: Laura Strachan, the Strachan Literary Agency. (June)