Paul Bowles

Until recently, Paul Bowles was not an author with whom I was familiar; his most celebrated novel, The Sheltering Sky, was not one I'd encountered. 

I spent the last two weeks reading that book, and am not sure, ultimately, how to characterize it. The first of three parts charts the arrival of a feuding American couple in North Africa; this is followed by their separation and, later, by their violent confrontation with the Sahara, including its people and landscape. 

The first section of the novel was the most effective, though the travelogue -- like the dialogue -- seemed a bit derivative. The second part, in which the couple grows apart, benefited from interesting plot sequences, and a cast of eccentric characters, but was rendered ineffective, I thought, as a result of Bowles's inability to identify what had brought the two together in the first place. The final section is the most severe, with unexpected forays into sexual violence and physical hardship. This part was -- for me, at least -- incongruous: Bowles's main female character, Kit, assumes an identity not at all in line with what's been developed before. Her transition is too rapid, and therefore less believable. 

In many ways, the final section of the novel felt rushed: if Bowles sought to make a point about American women, for instance, or about the role of sexuality in human relations, he ought to have expanded that section to include more visible contrasts between American society and the scene Kit and Port, her husband, encounter in Algeria. One argument which Bowles does, however, effectively make focuses on the idea of control. At the start of the novel, everything is programmed: Kit, especially, cannot take any action which first confirming its acceptability. By the end, she's jettisoned all of this: she is beholden to no one, and seems, in a sense, to have come completely undone. 

The question is why: why has this happened? Is it the desert which has done this to Kit, or is it some sort of recognition around the nature of her relationship with Port? I am not sure that Bowles himself knows the answer, and the result is a novel searching, frustratingly, for a moral.