cover image The Clothes of Nakedness

The Clothes of Nakedness

Benjamin Kwakye. Heinemann Educational Books, $13.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-435-91201-7

Evil lurks in the streets of Accra, Ghana, and it goes by the name of Mystique Mysterious. He can turn the sober to drink, persuade the faithful to cheat and rally the masses to hysteria. Unfortunately, he can also bore the reader to tears in Ghanaian-American Kwakye's debut--which, despite the inherent interest of its setting, fails to engage our sympathies with its flat characters, wooden dialogue and lack of naturalistic motivations. A suspenseless cautionary tale of greed and excess, this allegory introduces its abstractly villainous Mephistopheles to an Accra suburb, where he proceeds to destroy the lives of as many townspeople as possible by introducing free narcotics to drug-free clubs and extorting money from men after finding them employment. Showing neither irony nor subtlety, the plot itself is weighed down by its predictability and overwhelming preachiness, leaving the reader with an unsatisfying and forced conclusion. (May)