BILONGO

Two women fight over a man by slightly supernatural means in this novel about bad relationships.

Brewer’s tale triangulates Rawley Aimes, the first mate on an oil tanker; his wife, Marina, a pulchritudinous architect in Rio de Janeiro; and his lover, Lil, the ship’s cook, a blowsy redhead who holds him in erotic thrall. Marina pines for Rawley while he’s at sea but is beset by visions of him copulating sweatily with Lil and reading erotic poetry to her. When Rawley returns to Rio on shore leave, Marina plies him with food and sex. But Rawley, drunk, dejected, and mesmerized by a vision of Lil undergoing a Santeria ritual, tells the distraught Marina that he wants a divorce. His resolve is complicated yet not deterred when he swims to an isolated beach and meets Sibele, a teenager who reads his fortune from tarot cards and tells him that things probably won’t work out with Lil but that Marina will take him back. Rawley jets off to a vacation with Lil in Costa Rica, and she indeed proves to be a handful. She’s hypersexual but also grumpy, soused, and enraged by the rainy weather. Things seem to improve when the sun returns, but then Rawley abruptly dumps Lil in a scene that plays out in alternating bouts of tearful recrimination, histrionic guilt, and sex. Marina welcomes Rawley back as predicted, but once in Rio, he lapses into his old funk, drinking and dreaming of Lil. When Lil calls, he promises to return to her. At wits’ end, Marina hires a seer who tells fortunes from random Bible verses. The psychic senses a malevolent presence in the apartment and, when Rawley’s reading is unusually morbid, hints that witchcraft may be afoot.

Brewer’s yarn features tense domestic drama, lurid rites, vividly atmospheric writing—“A blood red moon hung heavy in the lower sky above the waves, rheumy and dull, like the eye of a killer”—and some well-wrought action set pieces, like an attempted rescue at sea during a raging storm. (“The lifeboat groaned and popped under the strain and visibly bowed between the two logs, which worked to stove it in. The rescuers watched in horror as blood began to pour from the little man’s nose and mouth and as his determined look turned to resignation.”) The sex scenes can feel overblown—“He entered her with force and thrust with the power of the booming ocean, pulling her hair across her back like the guiding mane of an unbridled horse.” But when the carnal thunder subsides, Brewer’s shrewdly observant prose ably conveys the ways relationships go sour through subtle details of bickering and body language (“Marina leaned across and hugged him to her hard, then kissed him long and passionately. His hands hovered just off her back and patted her softly now and then”). The character studies are sharply etched and realistic—so much so that they make painfully clear why all the players ought to abandon one another. Marina’s clingy oversolicitousness is suffocating; Lil’s volatility and peevishness are exhausting; and Rawley’s diffident refusal to commit—“I don’t know” is his mealy mouthed refrain—is infuriating. Readers may conclude that no amount of sorcery can or should keep any of them together.

An entertaining magical-realist tale of a marriage threatened by an infidelity.