Dirk Wittenborn: Fierce People

By MICHAEL LARSON*

This book's title is ironic, referring to both a lost tribe of the Amazon jungle and a privileged, closed community in New Jersey, circa 1978.

Fifteen-year-old Finn Earl and his mother, Liz, are swept to Vlyvalle from their poverty-stricken existence in their Lower East Side apartment by a millionaire benefactor, Ogden C. Osborne. Osborne is lord of the manor of the town of Vlyvalle, where he and his offspring live. Osborne becomes a father figure, replacing Finn's real father, whom he has yet to meet, a famous anthropologist studying the aforementioned Yanomamo tribe.

Finn's disappearance into the murky vortex that is his new family's existence forms the heart of this brilliant book, as he succumbs to the charms of Maya, Osborne's granddaughter, and the chameleon-like Bryce, her older brother.

In a place where Jews are referred to as Hawaiians - a term indicative of Vlyvalle's attempts to ignore reality - and where the only black person is the police chief, nothing is what it seems and everything is tinged with a sense of the unreal. Finn starts to realise that the tribe he has been sucked into is probably far more dangerous and unpredictable than the savages among whom his father lives.

To help this air of strangeness there are enough joints, vials of coke and soft drinks laced with vodka to keep most of Vlyvalle high and cocooned, while Finn's natural suspicion sees through the deceptions, fuels his love-hate relationship with the family (and in particular, Maya) and eats away at what morals he has managed to acquire in his short life.

If the innocent drawn into the world of the wealthy sounds a familiar theme, it's not surprising. There is more than a drop of Gatsby as things play out - more than a snort, too, of Brett Easton Ellis, particularly once the action moves to college. And Wittenborn has a Waugh-ish attitude to the privileged. The voyeur in you loves to see how the mega-rich really live, and schadenfreude means you can't help but smirk when their tight little world unravels.

But it is Finn, a marvellously real and lovable character in the mould of Holden Caulfield crossed with, well, Huckleberry Finn, that you share the novel with. His dilemmas over Maya and Bryce (and over his mother who adopts the rich lifestyle all too easily), and his initial, naive disbelief as events unfold - a naivete slowly subsumed by cynicism - endear him to us. A character such as he could so easily slip into cliche. Wittenborn never allows this to happen.

And the writing is brilliant. One morning Finn's mother "looked like someone who had tried to get rid of the flu by falling down the stairs". One of the socialites jumps horses "named after inclement weather"; another's hair "had that bleached blond, slightly snarled look of someone who'd ridden through life at high speeds with the top down".

As for the narrative itself, the dream world suddenly turns nightmare and you ride the deceptions and mistrust hand in hand with Finn. You often find yourself thinking, what would I do here? That, coupled with an overwhelming urge to know what happens next, shows that Wittenborn is a writer who gets you from the first, and stays in your head a long time after you turn the final page. Great stuff.

Bloomsbury

$36.95

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.