"You Can't Get There From Here," by Gayle Forman
Sunday, May 1, 2005
BOOK: "You Can't Get There From Here," by Gayle Forman (Rodale, $23.95)
TARGET AUDIENCE: People who remember what it was like to be "different."
An admitted "member of the tribe of the odd," and fearing that globalization soon will erase all cultural differences, Forman spends a year touring the shrinking world with her husband. She has an affinity for social outsiders and finds worlds within already remote worlds: in Kazakhstan, sword-wielding Tolkienists who dress as hobbits and wizards; in South Africa, natives who believe themselves to be a lost tribe of Israel; on Tonga, a transvestite subculture that defies gender classification.
Forman is an active participant in some of her stories -- working as an Anglo extra in a Bollywood movie, for example, or bonding with "sassy girls" and befriending the preteen souvenir hustlers at Angkor Wat. Similarly, she goes behind the scenes in Amsterdam's red light district to explore the daily lives of prostitutes. As she competently and entertainingly describes the mini-societies she finds and the kinships that are created therein, she also indirectly depicts the larger societies in which they operate. Meanwhile, the couple's experiences also work as a potent antidote to romantic notions about what a long trip can do for (and to) a relationship.
-- Jerry V. Haines