Books

Man of the world

Tony D'Souza has translated his life of adventure into a lyrical first novel.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published April 22, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Bob Croslin] Tony D’Souza’s first novel, Whiteman, has been praised for its narrative energy. “I don’t really get metafiction,” he says. “I just want to tell a good story.” His second novel, The Konkans, will be published in February 2008.

SARASOTA

Amid the homey clatter of a sunny diner, Tony D'Souza brims with tales of adventure.

He shuffles and deals a fat stack of snapshots from his last vacation: barricades and burning buses in the streets of Oaxaca, a machete-wielding crowd outside a Nicaraguan courthouse, his blue pickup perched on an impromptu ferry villagers built with two canoes and boards after D'Souza took a, well, experimental route over a mountain.

D'Souza has a knack for launching himself into the unknown and coming back with a really good story.

The narrator of his first novel, Whiteman, is an American relief worker in a remote village in Ivory Coast. D'Souza was a Peace Corps volunteer in a remote village there.

The novel's Jack Diaz, a.k.a. Whiteman, falls in love with the people and land of West Africa, but narrowly escapes with his life when a civil war heats up. Ditto D'Souza.

But, the author says, Whiteman is fiction, not memoir. "Some of those things happened to me, but some of them are exaggerated. Some are invented," he says. "And the war stuff I really toned down."

That might surprise readers of Whiteman's harrowing description of Jack's flight from a burning city and bands of heavily armed rebels. D'Souza says, "It was really much, much worse. But people are used to reading about the terrible things in Africa. That was like five percent of what happened to me there. I wanted to write about everything, not just the terrible part."

And so he did. Whiteman has its terrifying moments, but it also has laugh-out-loud humor, steamy sex, lyrically beautiful descriptions and enough insight into the West African cultures Jack encounters to satisfy an anthropologist.

Not that Whiteman reads like a textbook - anything but. Since it was published last year, it has won the Florida Gold Medal for fiction as well as best first fiction awards from Poets & Writers magazine and the American Academy of Arts and Letters - and has been nominated for Nerve magazine's award for best literary sex scene. It was a New York Times Book Review editor's pick and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times best first fiction award, to be announced Friday.

Not bad for a novel written at fever pitch in five months while D'Souza was teaching English classes at a California community college. The experience has been "wonderful, confusing and overwhelming," he says.

Perhaps the unlikeliest response to the book was a fashion layout for Playboy based on that sexy scene in Whiteman, which involves Jack chasing a flirtatious young woman through a cornfield.

"They had this beautiful model, and they built a little cornfield in the studio," D'Souza says wryly. "They put me in this long leather coat, just like I always wore in Africa."

Born and raised in Chicago, D'Souza studied creative writing at Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame. Now he travels much of the time from his home base in Sarasota, where his mother and sister live.

He wrote while he was in Africa, but lost all his work when he fled the war: "I walked out with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and a dog."

He did bring out an important contact. One of his fellow Peace Corps volunteers was a friend of powerful literary agent Liz Darhansoff, who has guided such books as The Shipping News, and who sold Whiteman to Harcourt.

D'Souza has already finished a second novel, to be published next year. The Konkans is based on the history of his father's family in Goa, in western India.

He's leaving soon for six months in Japan on a National Endowment for the Arts grant, having spent the last few months covering the controversial murder case in Nicaragua against American Eric Volz. His 12,000-word story about it will appear in the June issue of Outside. "I went there to write this story about surfers and real estate and walked into a mob outside the courthouse."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

Whiteman

By Tony D'Souza

Harcourt, 279 pages, $13

On the Web

www.tonydsouza.com

[Last modified April 19, 2007, 12:35:18]