In Fitzgerald’s novel, set in Long Island in 1922, Tom is the wealthy, old-aristocratic neighbor ofnarrator Nick Carraway and the mysterious, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby. Tom ismarried to the beautiful but superficial Daisy, a distant cousin of Nick, whohas an affair with the unmarried Gatsby.
Like Fraser, Rauchway offers his debut novel asthe unearthed memoir of his protagonist. In a preface, Rauchway, a historian atthe University of California-Davis and author of nonfiction historical works,dismisses Tom’s memoir as an impossibility by a fictional character, “anopportunistic fraud” that nevertheless “presents an honest and frank testimonyabout the machinery of American power” and “ruthlessly parodies the wishfulAmerican dream readers see in Fitzgerald’s novel.”
Tom, Rauchway says, holds “repugnant views”about everyone and everything. So he does; he jeers at everything that does notreflect his racist, reactionary, sexist, snobbish self. He is cheerfully amoraland his greed is on a par with Gordon Gekko’s. Ergo, Banana Republican is a novel made for our times.
It is 1924 and Tom lives in precarious luxury onthe estate with Daisy, having grown pudgy, cold and cross. That famous greenlight at the end of the dock, which has been interpreted in dozens of ways downthe decades, has been shattered; “dangling from its post, it looked like abroken wine bottle in a drunk’s loose grip.”
His luxury is precarious because the familyfortune is now controlled by his Aunt Gertrude. That means she also controlshimto the extent of sending him off to work as a kind of intelligence agentfor her railroad project in Nicaragua.Tom goes, grudgingly but also gladly, for it offers the possibility of makingenough money to get him out from under her thumb.
In Nicaragua,and later Guatemala,Tom gets up to the usual filibustering gringo adventures. He tries to buy agovernment, but it backfires. He manipulates stock to his own advantage. Heengages in gunrunning and attendant gun battles. And, naturally, he has his waywith every willing female, of whom there are not just a few.
Rauchway, again like Fraser, anchors his storyin the historical facts. This was the period when the United States used its Marines and agents fromthe State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence to get the government(s) itwanted in Nicaragua.
At various times Tom engages, militarily andotherwise, with Carlos José Solórzano, Gen. José Moncada, Juan BautistaSacasaprominent names in Nicaraguan historyand with probably the mostwell-known name to Americans, Augusto César Sandino (of Sandinista fame), whoTom labels “a truly dull swindler.” Rauchway even introduces a relativelyobscure real-life American, fortuitously named Richard Bell Buchanan, a Marinecaptain who died in Nicaraguain 1927, as a supposed cousin of Tom’s.
The story is intriguing, but the telling israther flat. After a promising start, it continually spins its wheels, neverquite gaining the traction or tension that should go with a thriller, even anabsurd one.
It ends uncertainly, with Tom notachievingyethis fortune, perhaps bespeaking a sequel. The author has a goodconcept and a likably unlikable character in Tom. If there is a next time, maywe respectfully ask that it include more about the recently frowsy Daisy?
