June 17–24, 1999

book quarterly

The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste: Father and Mother, First and Last

by Patricia Eakins
NYU Press, 256 p., $19.95

Everybody knows the yarn of the shipwrecked sailor, cast away on a tropical island. We’ve all also heard the tale of the noble slave who frees himself through his intellect and ability. Patricia Eakins builds her Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste from these time-honored strains — Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Aphra Behn’s Oronooko and such — to create a story with the worn-smooth feeling of driftwood.

Eakins, though, does more than just retell. Aswim with references to Caribbean colonial life and the French 18th century, the book shows painstaking research. Nor does she just transpose plots; she appropriates colonizers’ stories, retelling them from the colonized perspective.

Eakins’ novel follows a sugarcane slave’s progress from his eavesdropped and stolen education, through his marriage to a voodoo witch to his flight from the plantation, eventually landing on a deserted island. Pierre’s negotiation between his ancestry and his adopted culture, during the plantation half of the book fascinates. With the journey, though, the ground falls away under him — Pierre falls into wild hallucinations, replacing his people’s stories with crazed visions. Eakins’ writing follows, trading balance for lurid incoherence, ending in the thin-veiled theorizing of the Tempest-cribbed end.

The ideas driving the book are politically laudable. But good politics hardly ensures good art. Her recombination of other fictions works like an intellectual’s shell game, but by the end of the novel it is abundantly clear that the shells are all empty.

—Justin Bauer