Former Lakeland University professor pens novel ‘exceedingly relevant to modern America’: A book review
Former Lakeland University professor Jeff Elzinga’s richly set novel "The Distance Between Stars" (Water’s Edge Press, 325 pages, $20) tracks a chaotic week in the life of Joe Kellerman, a foreign service officer at the American embassy in Umbika, a fictional East African nation on the brink of civil war.
When the novel begins, Umbika, presumably created partially from Elzinga’s memories from his own time as a foreign service officer in the region in the 1990s, is simmering. The Jimmy Mulenga dictatorship, in power since the British colonials withdrew, is receiving criticism abroad for its human rights violations. Now, rumblings have begun in Umbika itself for a multiparty system, rumblings that the Mulenga regime has been quick to quell, mostly through his private, unscrupulous militia.
Kellerman, meanwhile, is a 15-year veteran of embassy work in countries throughout Africa. He has gained a reputation as “a fixer,” a man of immense discernment and general competence, so much so that ambassadors throughout the continent have personally requested he join their mission.
The country’s tension is scarcely daunting to Kellerman — he’s at home in it. Those who have lived abroad will feel a kinship with this expatriate side of Kellerman’s life, at one moment hauntingly lonesome (“Every night, twilight covers the roads in Africa with long shadows in melancholy colors, a reminder for ex-pats and diplomats alike of being cosmically adrift and far from home”), at another hilarious (during one exchange, his co-worker says of one increasingly manic expat they know, “That’s a guy who needs to get out of Africa”), and still at others ethically compromising (like when Kellerman’s boss, to help his own career, pushes Kellerman to grant an American visa to an Umbikan they both know will inform on Umbikan citizens who criticize Mulenga in America).
The political setting robustly laid out by Elzinga throughout the novel is perhaps its greatest success. Wheels within wheels are believably described — from the sources of the longstanding strife between the country’s ethnic groups, to the personalities driving their present animosity like the shadowy Mulenga and his embattled critic Wisdom Chitsaya, to the invention of present-day African nations like Umbika in the first place, described by Kellerman here: “A hundred years earlier, Africa’s borders were invented in Berlin by European lords and generals using nothing but the outline map of a continent, a pen, a straight edge, and their shared sense of entitlement. Actual fences and checkpoints came later. … Fences and frontiers were fine for Europeans to manage their interests, but boundaries created by outsiders would never change how one African tribe felt about another.”
The novel’s tension is driven along by the relationship between Kellerman and his chief antagonist, famous African-American journalist Maurice Hightower, whose arrival to Umbika unbalances the normally unflappable Kellerman, not to mention Kellerman’s co-workers, who know well that Hightower is notoriously critical of everything about the U.S. government: “Hightower’s pen had skewered U.S. Presidents for forty years, his rage always hitting the same sharp notes — government and big business conspire to tilt privilege and opportunity towards those with the lightest skin color, at the expense of those with the darkest. There was no American Dream for a black man, Hightower claimed. There were only nightmares for them, and the blacker the skin, the more disturbed the sleep.” Hightower is old friends with Jimmy Mulenga, and sure enough, nearly the moment he steps off the plane, he begins castigating American embassy officials for undermining Mulenga.
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When Kellerman is assigned to chaperone Hightower throughout Umbika as the latter seeks to expose evidence of the embassy’s support for violent anti-Mulenga elements, the duel between their practical goals and, even more so, between their opposing world views, becomes the novel’s chief conflict. It eventually boils over into a deeply personal argument that reads like the kind of shouting match about race in America you might see on CNN and spurs Hightower to abandon Kellerman in the middle of the night. This pivotal moment in the story, which brings out the worst in both men, brings out the best in Elzinga, who summons forth from the two characters the poison that courses through us all as we do things like argue politics at holiday gatherings or in the comment sections of our friend’s Facebook post that was so ignorant that he or she deserves a little public education.
With the scope of "The Distance Between Stars," therefore, Elzinga has created a story that is exceedingly relevant to modern America. In the end, what’s at stake between Kellerman and Hightower in their clash — as well as between Umbikans in their civil war — is the same, albeit at a more advanced stage, as what is at stake for Americans in ours: our fragile connection to each other, and the question of whether, in the face of all that has happened in the past, it can hold.
Danny Spatchek graduated from Lakeland University with a degree in English in 2012. He has taught high school English in South Korea for the past 10 years.
This article originally appeared on Sheboygan Press: Jeff Elzinga book The Distance Between Stars 'exceedingly relevant'
