The New York Times
… it reads like what you'd get if Tom Wolfe clambered inside the head of Noam Chomsky -- it elegantly and angrily scorches a lot of earth. You wouldn't want to read many novels that were as hyper-politicized as this one is, but there's something almost old-fashioned about the way Newman wears his heart utterly on his sleeve.
— Dwight Garner
Fountain at the Center of the World
- ISBN: 1932360115
- ISBN-13: 9781932360110
- Pub. date: 01/09/2004
- Publisher: Soft Skull Press, Inc.
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Police across Tamaulipas, Mexico's north-eastern state are hunting Chano Salgado. A reclusive young widower and political apostate, Salgado goes on the run after he is persuaded to blow up the pipelines of a sluicing operation sucking the local groundwater dry. Meanwhile, Evan Hatch, a London-based flack for an "issues-management" PR firm, is dying from leukemia. Hoping to find a donor, he tracks down his long-lost brother in Mexico (from where he had been adopted at birth) while en route to the WTO meeting in Seattle. Chano, desperately needing to cross the border, finds his brother (Evan) first, and steals his passport. In the third narrative strand, Chano’s young son, Daniel, himself given up for adoption in Costa Rica, is also looking for his father. Traveling to Mexico, he is forced to flee when the police take him hostage hoping to force his father turn himself in. Squirreling himself away on a freighter, he is rescued by a UK refugee organization whose activists fly to Seattle with him to participate in the protest hoping to reunite him with his father, who, masquerading as Evan, is about to give a speech to the European Roundtable of Industrialists…
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Publishers Weekly
In this intense but flawed global drama, a British PR flack tries to find his long-lost brother after being diagnosed with a fatal form of leukemia. Evan Hatch works long hours running interference for a firm that specializes in complex governmental trade issues, but his sudden cancer diagnosis forces him to track down his brother, Chano, to orchestrate a bone marrow transplant. The search is complicated by his brother's work as a political activist in northern Mexico, where Chano is on the run for bombing a sluicing plant that was poisoning the local groundwater supply. The family angle turns into a triangle when Chano's teenage son, Daniel, who was put up for adoption, travels to Mexico from Costa Rica to try to locate his father. A complex, extended game of hunt-and-chase then ensues, with Chano and Daniel fleeing the various authorities who want to arrest and deport them, respectively. Meanwhile, Evan learns that he has been misdiagnosed, and that he is in the last, deadly stage of a rare tropical blood disease called Chagas' disease that he contracted as an infant. The climax takes place in Seattle against the backdrop of the riots that shut down the World Trade Organization meetings several years ago, where the paths of Chano, Daniel and Evan finally converge. Newman's extensive political research adds depth and breadth, but it also clutters the book with so much factual detail that the protagonists are thrust aside, and the problem is compounded by the introduction of far too many ancillary characters. With a bit more clarity, this might have been a superb novel, but instead it is a compromised testimonial to Newman's formidable range, intelligence and talent. 15-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.