The Tesseract

February 1, 1999
The tesseract of Garland's title refers to the reduction of a four-dimensional cube to a three-dimensional one: "We can see the thing unraveled, but not the thing itself." In an attempt at similar dimensionality, Garland (The Beach) has written a novel that operates on two levels. His characters intersect in a metaphysical web and also in a violent series of coincidences. A sailor named Sean waits to rendezvous with a crime boss named Don Pepe in a seedy hotel in Manila. Sean kills Don Pepe in ambush, but the dead man's henchmen chase Sean through the streets of Manila. This is action-movie stuff, but the story soon moves through a whole new cast of characters. Sean runs past two street boys and ends up cornered in a family's home in an upper-class neighborhood. Garland now takes up these secondary characters and tells their stories, deconstructing the exoticism of his premise. We read of a woman named Rosa's romantic history and her father's death; and we learn of the street waifs' desperate lives. The boys sell their dreams to a psychologist named Alfredo, who is writing a thesis about the unconscious lives of Filipino street kids. Although Garland's allusions to super-symmetry and tesseracts are far-fetched, the reader will come away impressed by his sense of place and his unique storytelling, which combines a brisk, complex plot with an ability to get into the souls and skins of people. BOMC and QPB alternate; author tour. (Feb.) FYI: Leonardo DiCaprio will star in the movie version of The Beach.

Starred review from January 1, 1999
In this intriguing and intricate novel set in the outskirts of Manila, Garland (The Beach, LJ 2/1/97) attempts to unravel the threads that have brought together in a bloody climax three totally dissimilar sets of individuals--gangsters hot on the trail of the man who killed their boss, the middle-class family in whose kitchen they find themselves, and two street urchins who follow the chase. Of all of them, homeless young Cente's story is perhaps the most central to the overall theme--the impossibility of ever fully understanding the meaning of the forces that drive our lives. Ever since his father disappeared, shortly after their arrival in Manila, Cente has struggled to understand what happened. He has to believe that his father was killed, that he was not abandoned. His conclusion: "Maybe there is nothing here I am meant to understand. Maybe there is no meant to understand. This means something." Fast-paced, suspenseful, and thought-provoking, this is top-drawer fiction and highly recommended for public and academic collections.--David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL

January 1, 1999
Two wandering street boys, whose only steady income is telling their dreams to a young, anguished psychologist for payment, witness a man being chased through the slums of Manila by two gunmen. The boys have just run away from an angry driver after causing him a flat tire while his car is stalled in a traffic jam. After the driver calls his wife to tell her of his delay, she begins daydreaming about her first lover to avoid settling into another boring evening of American television with her live-in mother. Suddenly she hears gunshots--the gangsters and the man they are chasing. Thus, these four stories of the hunted man, the psychologist, the urchins, and the wife--each fleshed out by reminiscences--make up the dimensions of the "tesseract" (a four-dimensional analogue of a cube), which itself unravels as the stories and characters converge in a shocking ending. This is one of the most structurally complex noir novels ever written and perhaps the only one ever set in the Philippines. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)

October 1, 1998
After his best-selling The Beach, Garland visits the Philippines to track three sets of characters: gangsters, middle-class parents, and street kids.