Book blurs lines of propaganda, art

Tom Paine\'s short story "Will You Say Something Monsieur Eliot?" details the saga of a smug and wealthy Princeton grad on top of the world. The piece kicks off Paine's sparkling debut collection of fiction, "Scar Vegas."\nEverything in life has been presented to Eliot on a silver platter. But his luck turns a sharp 180 degrees one fateful day. When out sailing off of the Florida coast, a fierce storm lays waste to his yacht. After drifting on his mast for days, he's picked up by a boatload of Haitian refugees.\nThey\'re ecstatic to see him. Their sail also fell victim to the storm, and they\'re sure that the half- starved Yankee will be their ticket to shore. And so they nurse him back to health and pamper him as best they can.\n"Alphonse let go of Eliot\'s foot and returned to his box. A wrinkled woman shuffled over and poured a few drops of water into Eliot\'s mouth from the good edge of a broken glass. A few minutes later a young girl carefully poured a few drops into his mouth from a rusty can. Alphonse watched them and nodded from his box. Eliot kept his mouth open, and one by one Haitians came to him and offered a few drops of their supply."\nTime passes, and their already meager supplies dwindle.\nMuch to Eliot's horror, his companions begin dropping like flies. \n"On the night of the seventh day, Eliot heard more bodies going over the side. Those that went with a splash and grunts Eliot knew were already dead, but many more went with a sucking sound and Eliot knew those had jumped, and some cried out and there was no question. Alphonse sat with\nEliot all day on the eighth day and even found a few drops of water for his lips. On that night, the bodies again jumped or were dropped over the side, and Alphonse came to him at dawn and held Eliot\'s foot gently in his hands."\nEventually, help arrives in a helicopter. Eliot is taken aboard, while the Haitians are left to a watery grave.\nIt\'s a heavy-handed story, one of many in the collection.\nPaine likes to drive home his political points with revved-up bulldozer.\nBut one could hardly expect subtlety from someone who\'s adopted the name of a revolutionary known for his rabble-rousing oratory.\nLeaning to the radical left, Paine dedicates the book to "Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist hanged (in 1995) for our insatiable oil gluttony." Imperialism is a subject he regularly returns to.\nIn "The Hotel on Monkey Forest Road," a man in a bar relates an anecdote about a developer who tried to import Palm Trees to the Indonesian island of Bali. The tribal elders arch their eyebrows and eventually force him to understand their ways.\nSet during the Gulf War, "The Battle of Khafji," raises the question: "Is it still a war if nobody dies on one side?" "A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the Stock Market First Breaking 6,000" concerns a brokerage executive getting her comeuppance on the Mexico border.\nThough it certainly bows, Paine's flair for imaginative storytelling doesn't crack under the weight of his political messages. While his prose is as punchy as Hemingway's, his real talent lies in yarn-spinning.\nIn the title story of the collection, he basically riffs off an urban legend long in circulation.\nA man accepts a drink from a woman at an airport bar. Later, he finds himself waking up in a bathtub full of ice short of a kidney, now out in the black market.\nIn the ideological microcosm of his work, Paine probably wanted to illustrate the extremes of greed. But the propagandistic overtones are overshadowed by the simple fact that it's an engaging story. And beyond that, he manages to draw out the humanity of the subject, an ex-con on his way to his sister's wedding. \nHe's the sort of character Paine sympathizes with -- the underdog, the run-down soldier, the world-weary cowboy. Paine clearly hopes to give voice to the disenfranchised through his fiction. \nA former mental ward orderly and journalist who now teaches creative writing, Paine will doubtless toil in obscurity. Che Guevera just doesn't have the same charisma in a bear market.