Sex, booze and Ito

My first thought after finishing "Crawling at Night," a novel penned by Nani Power, is one of confusion. This book literally drips of sex and booze, but remains resolutely devoid of passion and life. No character in the book calls for sympathy from the reader ... everyone is a member of society living on the fringes. A novel exploring the loneliness that envelops the lives of its characters, "Crawling at Night" passes on the opportunity to draw any form of a conclusion and ends in an unsatisfying, tangled knot.\n"Crawling at Night" follows the lives of several unsavory people through the course of their memories and a couple of days. We discover Ito, a sushi chef from Japan who is longing not only for his dead wife, but also his Chinese prostitute mistress, Xiu Xiu. Ito abandoned his son to his sister-in-law and packed up his bags for America after the child murdered the prostitute. Ito lives alone, speaks stilted English and longs for his homeland and the love of a woman.\nIto's infatuation falls upon Mariane, a hopeless alcoholic waitress who is pining over the loss of her daughter. Mariane cannot picture her daughter as the 13-year-old she is, but constantly thinks of her only in the terms of a baby. Though she dreams of being reunited with her daughter, all Mariane does is drink away her pain and have sordid sex with strangers.\nThe reader is dragged along with the two lost souls as they go through their days. Along the way, they encounter a Chinatown prostitute who fears Ito and a slow, Vietnamese man who loves the prostitute and dreams of marrying her. These characters circle each other in a haphazard mess of a plot -- and I use the word plot loosely.\nThere seems to be no drive to the novel at all. Power emulates the life of these people, and some lives have no direction. What the reader gets is the haphazard memories of these four characters intermixed with the present day. What is intended to be an emotional book ends up tedious as Power abruptly jumps from character reverie to character reverie. Just as abruptly, the book ends.\nWhile life doesn't come to neat conclusions either, the haphazard ending of this novel seems to imply Power just got tired of writing, and ended her book. I was left wondering why I had even read the thing at all -- the characters had not grown and their situations were still hopeless. \nI ponder why this book was written. "Crawling at Night" piles on stereotype after stereotype about Asian cultures. Power seems to rely on the foreignness of the characters to build interest in their plights. There is no real story behind the 'exotic' characters and none show any growth. Ito remains lonely, Mariane is still an alcoholic, and the Vietnamese man and Chinatown prostitute remain static. Some stories just aren't worth telling, and "Crawling at Night" is one of them.\n"Crawling at Night" is published by Atlantic Monthly Books and the paperback edition has a list price of $13. It is available at www.amazon.com.