cover image Andes Rising

Andes Rising

James Munves. New Directions Publishing Corporation, $21.95 (189pp) ISBN 978-0-8112-1407-0

The 1971 diary of what may be the last months in the life of a vanished Manhattan Project scientist, Thomas Cooper, constitute this whimsical but flawed first novel. Its entries are full of natural fact, philosophical musings and historical notes. Sent by Thomas's aging mother, Sadie, from California to Colombia to find her missing son, Rabbi Teitelbaum gets his hands on the journal and converts it to a palimpsest. His footnotes, which he affectionately calls the ""Teitelbaum midrash,"" are rendered in a sometimes difficult to read though quite realistic handwriting. Teitelbaum, an unappealingly intrusive character whose concern over the probably dead Thomas's spiritual growth and religious neglect is nevertheless touching, contradicts, calls into question and pokes fun at many of Thomas's private thoughts. He is more reverent of Thomas's relationship to nature, however, and gives background to Thomas's obsession with the rare blue-and-black tanager--the ostensible reason Thomas left his family and took off for Colombia on a Peace Corps ornithology mission. Reading the diary, Teitelbaum looks for clues that might indicate whether the lost Thomas is dead or alive; there are suggestions that he has fallen in with or prey to tropical bird smugglers, kidnappers, drug dealers or atomic age spies. Most satisfying in this otherwise loose novel is Thomas's relationship with the work of 19th-century ornithologist F.M. Chapman, whose study of the tanager helped him develop a quasi-Darwinian theory about the environmental roots of speciation. The scrapbook effect diverts the eye--clippings from newspapers, field guides, Manhattan Project memos, letters from abandoned loved ones--but cannot bear the weight of narrative responsibility Munves gives it. (May)