Dear Future

The political antics and cultural turmoil of an unnamed Caribbean republic on the eve of a presidential election provide a teeming backdrop for the poignant tale of a divided family in D'Aguiar's second novel (after The Longest Memory). When Red Head, a plucky, precocious nine-year-old of mixed African, Portuguese and Indian ancestry, is accidentally struck on the forehead by his uncle Beanstalk's ax, he is overcome with ominous visions in red and black. Having been abandoned by his parents, Red Head lives in the village of Ariel, a bastion of opposition politics, with his eccentric uncles, a religious grandmother and his combative elder brother, Bash Man Goady. Red Head's mother, estranged from her philandering husband, has fled with his three younger brothers to a London slum. When another of Red Head's uncles knocks out a wrestler on a state-sponsored tour, an angry mob of government supporters retaliates by setting fire to the family's house. Meanwhile, the president, a brute who out of pique shoots a horse dead, is waging a dirty campaign while selling out his country. In the novel's final chapter--a series of letters addressed, ""Dear Future""-- Red Head prays to be reunited with his family--and wonders whether he has any future at all. Veering from a portrait of Red Head's tumultuous family to a sharp satire of the government that has helped tear it asunder, the novel's plot threads intersect gracefully but inconclusively. D'Aguiar succeeds here less in shaping a fully realized novel than in capturing the cultural stresses that rend the social fabric of an unstable Caribbean nation. (Sept.)