The main character in John Clark Pratt’s “American Affairs,” an expatriate living in Portugal during the 1970s, ticks off the reasons he left his home country mid-novel.
The laundry list includes the obvious — Watergate, smog and bell-bottoms — and lesser distractions — eco-freaks, unions and Playboy magazine.
But it’s his home country’s foreign policy that puts him in peril in this shrewdly packaged thriller.
Pratt, a former English department chairman at Colorado State University, spent time in Portugal from 1974 to 75. His story reflects that intense, first-person research, but it’s hardly a dry historical recap. Pratt toys with the tension via some spy-novel flourishes, from kidnappings to random gunfire just outside the hero’s apartment window.
“American Affairs” emerges as both a journey through political chaos and a cautionary tale of a country aggressively intervening abroad. And, if the latter sounds prescient in the Age of Terror, that’s no accident.
“It was really no country for a man my age,” professor Chris Jefferson declares of the United States, one reason he decided to settle down in Lisbon as the story opens.
The first-person narrative begins with the professor being kidnapped and thrown into a car by an unknown number of assailants. The story soon reverses course to show the events before the abduction.
The professor leads a leisurely life in his new country, but little is peaceful around him. The nation’s political structure is in constant flux, with talk of coups and other destabilizing forces dominating the news cycle.
He doesn’t want to be bothered by the tumult, but he can’t avoid getting drawn in. He falls for a local woman named Teresa, whose ties to a socialist-leaning group means she’s rarely in one place for long.
An old pal named Casey, an inveterate drunk, keeps involving himself in one noisy protest after another. And a U.S. official named Quick insists the professor feed him whatever information he has on the communist forces encircling the nation.
“American Affairs” clicks as both a star-crossed love story and a politically charged thriller. The professor’s relationship with Teresa plays out in a teasing fashion, and he falls hard for her despite doubts about her fidelity.
The novel’s social commentary never butts heads with the narrative until the last chapter. Pratt leaves the moral hand-wringing to the reader. Pratt cares too much about the subtle elements of a society at the breaking point, as well as the people struggling to carve out a government that won’t let them down.
Pratt understands the chasm that exists between the professor and the locals. He’s a “northamerican” who can’t possibly understand the nation’s politics or the passions afoot. But he cannot stay above the fray. He cares too much for Teresa and finds a kinship for his new neighbors that is hard to define.
“American Affairs” hews a mite too closely to the spy novel formula, so when people start disappearing, it lacks the emotional impact it otherwise might convey.
Pratt wisely leavens the dark material with some pitch black humor. Portugal’s political structure may be crumbling, but Casey still finds time between rallies and drunken escapades to secure a new Burger King franchise in Madrid. And Quick and his State Department cronies hardly inspire confidence with their bumbling.
The author captures the innocence and idealism of Portugal’s revolutionary figures without judgment, making them both pitiful and kindhearted. But the very real danger streaked through the novel could change that in an instant.
The finale pages of “American Affairs” push the modern-day parallels harder than necessary, but by then Pratt has more than earned the right to proselytize for a paragraph or two.
Christian Toto is a freelance writer in Denver.
