The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Scar Vegas and Other Stories by Tom PaineNicole Lamy
Tom Paine. Scar Vegas and Other Stories. Harcourt, 2000. 215 pp. $22.00.
The stories in Tom Paine’s first collection of short stories are filled with the ugliest Americans, although Paine’s characters do more than simply sport fanny packs and garish Bermuda shorts. In “The Hotel on Monkey Forest Road,” an arrogant real estate developer in Bali tramples on the spiritual offerings of the Balinese people that stand in the path of his mega-hotel development. He then turns his exploitative ways into a barroom tale. In “A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the Stock Market First Breaking 6,000,” Melanie Applebee, a down-and-out management consultant, broke and stranded in Mexico, gleefully recalls the restructuring maneuvers that made her a corporate star: “The plan closed down marginal stores, bought a chain of cut-rate drug stores, slashed the pension program, reduced employee stock options, severely limited the health plan, and cut wages.” Paine serves these characters up as models of the booming global economy. But in these geopolitical parables the international robber barons get their comeuppance and watching them get their just deserts is wicked fun. American economic arrogance is met with swift violence and deadpan humor. But Scar Vegas isn’t all revenge fantasy. Paine’s world is more balanced and true; the virtuous and downtrodden suffer, too, often at the hands of the more economically privileged. The deftly drawn characters keep the tales from sinking into the type of morality tales in which characters are stand-ins for Truth or Capitalism or Evil. In this respect, Paine succeeds where many political fiction writers fail; his characters remain individuals and that allows him to make the political personal. Furthermore he offers no windy historical exposition or clunky, self-righteous, didactic summation. In these compressed, savage stories there isn’t a wasted word or action. [Nicole Lamy]