House arrest: a novel

A writer for an "aging hippie travel guide service," Maggie Conover has returned to la isla in the Caribbean, ostensibly to update information on hotels and tourist sites. But she is placed under house arrest, apparently because she had befriended Isabel Calderon, the now-missing daughter of the island's despotic leader, El Caballo. As Morris painstakingly unfolds the story, it becomes clear that Maggie aided El Caballo's rebellious daughter in escaping the poverty-stricken, claustrophobic island. Told in flashbacks and from varying viewpoints, Isabel's story is the story of the island and its people, the political made personal. Maggie's relationship with the sensuous, tempestuous Isabel is erotically charged if never consummated. The ambiguity provides the tension: Has Maggie been seduced into a dangerous act? Or is she doing what she thinks is right, politically and morally? Detained by the government police, she is forced to examine her decisions, her life, and marriage and womanhood, in the light of both her needs and her heretofore suppressed desire for intrigue and adventure. Although the ending seems a bit snapped off, this is a rich and nuanced novel. --Ron Antonucci

A small Caribbean island whose people are starved for food and freedom is the setting for Morris's fourth novel (after A Mother's Love). Like Morris, who is also a travel writer (Nothing to Declare), protagonist Maggie Conover writes for a travel magazine. She has returned to la isla to update a guidebook she wrote two years earlier. It's a bad idea: during her previous visit, she secretly gave her passport to Isabel Calderón, the outspokenly disenchanted daughter of the dictator, El Caballo, so that Isabel could flee the island in disguise. Maggie's naïveté in returning to this totalitarian state is compounded by her behavior after she's arrested and detained in a seedy hotel. Slow to discern the danger of her position, she never contacts the embassy or a lawyer, in spite of her interrogation by a greasy government functionary, and other frightening incidents. Were this the only improbability, the reader might overlook Maggie's passivity, especially since Morris does provide some motivation for her flaky behavior. But it's hard to accept that Isabel, her mother and her daughter each achieve instant emotional intimacy with Maggie, immediately pouring out the stories of their lives in dangerously candid detail. These long, lyric confessions provoke echoes of Isabel Allende, but they lack her magic resonance. In the end, it is not Maggie's story but the claustrophobic atmosphere of a country locked in a dictator's iron grip that the reader will find unforgettable. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Novelist (A Mother's Love, LJ 2/15/93) and travel writer (Nothing To Declare, Atlantic Monthly, 1992) Morris brings both interests together in this new novel. Maggie Conover's latest assignment for "the aging-hippie travel guide service" for which she works is in a Communist country in the Caribbean known as "la isla." On a return visit, she is detained at immigration and subsequently awaits deportation while under house arrest at a tourist hotel. With lots of free time on her hands, Maggie becomes retrospective, remembering her love for her husband and young daughter, yet her need to get away from them on these working excursions; her conflicting feelings about her employer and ecotourism; and, most especially, a woman named Isabel she met on her last visit to la isla whom she knows to be the source of her current troubles. Maggie's hopes and fears, as well as those of Isabel, estranged daughter of the island's revolutionary leader, are intimately revealed, allowing us to feel the isolation and desperation that both women experience. Recommended for women's studies and popular collections.‘Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An American travel writer is forcibly detained on a Soviet- linked Caribbean island in this fourth novel from Morris--a murky, claustrophobic work that fails to penetrate the depths of the author's previous fiction (most recently, A Mother's Love, 1993). Thirty-six-year-old Maggie Conover's life in Brooklyn is pleasant enough, sturdily constructed around an architect husband and a five-year-old daughter. Still, even after ten years of roaming the world updating a series of travel guides, Maggie's natural restlessness prods her to pack her bags every few months for another trek into the unknown. This time, her trip turns ominous when she's detained at customs upon arrival on an unnamed island. Implying that her detention has to do with the disappearance of Isabel, a local woman whom Maggie befriended on a previous visit, the island officials place the American under house arrest at the pleasant Hotel España. There, with nothing to do, Maggie has time to reflect on her brief relationship with the missing Isabel, only daughter of the country's despotic leader, nicknamed El Caballo. Fascinated by Isabel's reputation for defying her father, identifying with her desperate desire to flee the closed, poverty-ridden island, and physically attracted by the woman's beauty and grace, sensible Maggie did in fact uncharacteristically risk her own safety by agreeing to ``lose'' her passport and plane ticket so that Isabel could use them to escape. Maggie's act then can be chalked up to infatuation, but her return now is more difficult to understand. In any case, once she has had leisure to relive her quasi-erotic experience, she's abruptly released--to go back to her family a grateful and perhaps wiser woman. Flat descriptions of dusty roads and crumbling villas alternate with the purple prose of Isabel's dramatic life story, giving the reader a sharp sense of place and character but little else of substance. Not this masterful author's best work.

Novelist (A Mother's Love, LJ 2/15/93) and travel writer (Nothing To Declare, Atlantic Monthly, 1992) Morris brings both interests together in this new novel. Maggie Conover's latest assignment for "the aging-hippie travel guide service" for which she works is in a Communist country in the Caribbean known as "la isla." On a return visit, she is detained at immigration and subsequently awaits deportation while under house arrest at a tourist hotel. With lots of free time on her hands, Maggie becomes retrospective, remembering her love for her husband and young daughter, yet her need to get away from them on these working excursions; her conflicting feelings about her employer and ecotourism; and, most especially, a woman named Isabel she met on her last visit to la isla whom she knows to be the source of her current troubles. Maggie's hopes and fears, as well as those of Isabel, estranged daughter of the island's revolutionary leader, are intimately revealed, allowing us to feel the isolation and desperation that both women experience. Recommended for women's studies and popular collections. Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews

A small Caribbean island whose people are starved for food and freedom is the setting for Morris's fourth novel (after A Mother's Love). Like Morris, who is also a travel writer (Nothing to Declare), protagonist Maggie Conover writes for a travel magazine. She has returned to la isla to update a guidebook she wrote two years earlier. It's a bad idea: during her previous visit, she secretly gave her passport to Isabel Calderon, the outspokenly disenchanted daughter of the dictator, El Caballo, so that Isabel could flee the island in disguise. Maggie's naivete in returning to this totalitarian state is compounded by her behavior after she's arrested and detained in a seedy hotel. Slow to discern the danger of her position, she never contacts the embassy or a lawyer, in spite of her interrogation by a greasy government functionary, and other frightening incidents. Were this the only improbability, the reader might overlook Maggie's passivity, especially since Morris does provide some motivation for her flaky behavior. But it's hard to accept that Isabel, her mother and her daughter each achieve instant emotional intimacy with Maggie, immediately pouring out the stories of their lives in dangerously candid detail. These long, lyric confessions provoke echoes of Isabel Allende, but they lack her magic resonance. In the end, it is not Maggie's story but the claustrophobic atmosphere of a country locked in a dictator's iron grip that the reader will find unforgettable. (May) Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information.