"Brazil, a Novella"

Stories about the open road comprise a robust American literary tradition. Good road stories tend to have a couple of things in common: the road and its challenges teach the travelers something about themselves they couldn't have learned by staying put. And the true—as opposed to ostensible—reason for the journey is always the same: the search for home, not as an actual destination, but as that mythical place where the heart can be at rest. Jesse Lee Kercheval's novella Brazil makes a fine contribution to this tradition.

The Brazil of the title is more a measure of loss than an actual location. Paulo, the novella's nineteen-year-old narrator, sometimes tells people he was born in Brazil, but it's really his father who's the Brazilian, an absent parent who supported Paulo and his mother for some years before eventually abandoning them both. Paulo's mother is more or less absent as well, and to underline the rootlessness of his life, he lives and works in a hotel. The novella is set in the late 1980s, and its opening scenes take place in Miami during the era of Miami Vice, when South Beach was still tacky enough to provide an interesting springboard for a story like this one. However, Brazil doesn't linger in Miami for long; instead it roams from Florida to Wisconsin in a shiny black BMW.

PaulOs longing for some sense of connection creates a rationale for his journey, and for some of the absurdities that take place on the road. Kercheval provides Paulo with a perfectly inappropriate traveling companion, Claudia, a woman in her forties who carries a handbag stuffed with cash and is high on pills and coke for most of the journey. She picks up all the traveling expenses, which include a new suit of clothes for Paulo. You get the picture: white jacket with broad shoulders and pushed up sleeves; brightly patterned shirt. The account of PaulOs attempt at college—he got into a good school, but the loss of a girl to his best friend derailed him and he dropped out—unspools as backstory while the antics of the hapless Claudia veer wildly between comedy and tragedy.

Paulo figures some things out while trying to accommodate his dysfunctional traveling companion, and while he does, Brazil purrs along like the engine of a shiny black BMW, well-paced and engaging, until Kercheval caps the journey with an unexpectedly fine ending. Kercheval is a professor of English at UW-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the author of eleven books of fiction and an award-winning memoir. She has written an ending to this novel that is simultaneously surprising and deft, an accomplishment in itself. It manages to be convincing despite the fact that we did not see it coming, persuading us that, for all the bumps in the road, we've been on an expertly controlled ride.