Waxwings, by Jonathan Raban

I occasionally pick up a book because I like the cover, and that was the case with Waxwings, by Jonathan Raban. In this case, I was shopping at the AAUW Used Book Sale in State College, PA, one of the largest such sales in the country, with close to half a million books. Often I attend the sale three or four days in a row; the first two days are full price, the third half price, and the fourth is bag day (all you can fit for $5). I'm especially vulnerable on bag day, and that's when I picked up Waxwings; at that price it doesn't hurt to take a chance on a new book or author.

Waxwings is set in Seattle in 1999-2000, at the height of the dot-com boom. Beth and Tom are a couple whose marriage is slowly disintegrating. Beth is a writer and editor working for an online real estate company; Tom is a literature professor at the University of Washington (UW). Their four-year-old son Finn figures prominently in the story of Beth and Tom's breakup, an ongoing theme being his misbehavior at preschool and his parents' disagreements about what he should eat or watch on television. Another key figure is Chick, an illegal Chinese immigrant who's trying to save enough money to pay off the debt to the men who brought him to the U.S. His path crosses Tom's when he offers to replace the roof on his Queen Anne Victorian home, using a crew of illegal Mexican immigrants.

I was unfamiliar with Mr. Raban's work before reading Waxwings. He's a travel writer and novelist with 18 books to his credit. His writing is very good and the plot drew me along as he developed several subplots. One of the subplots involved a young girl who disappeared from a trail on the same day that Tom was hiking there. After his and Beth's separation he was falling apart, not taking care of himself and smoking. His hike helped him to develop an idea for a new novel, but also put him in the place where a crime was committed, and his disheveled appearance and the fact that he was smoking, made him the most memorable character to everyone hiking that day. He quickly becomes a "person of interest," causing UW to put him on paid leave and his wife to begin to doubt him. As he struggles with this problem as well as his wife's departure and Chick's work on his house, he begins to realize that he can survive these problems and begins to make his way back into a semblance of normalcy.

This book is funny and well-written. The main characters: Tom, Beth, Finn, and Chick are well-developed and believable. Seattle and the dot-com boom around the turn of the 21st century are also very well described. The bust that follows the boom is subtly hinted at, and Beth's new financial "security" due to her stock options is clearly at risk. Not stated explicitly, her new wealthy status was certainly a factor in her decision to leave Tom. The title of the book refers to a species of birds that light upon a bush or tree and eat everything possible before moving on, paralleling the dot-com boom and its impact on Seattle. The book leaves the reader with a feeling that Tom will survive all of his crises and Chick will flourish; Beth's future is really questionable. Recommended.

Jonathan Raban. Waxwings. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. 282 pages. ISBN 0375410082.