drkottke 's review for:

Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

4.0

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The overarching story is a transatlantic cruise from Mexico to Germany in 1931, but the execution is like a Nashville-era Robert Altman film on paper, with the lives of a sprawling cast of characters intersecting at a series of events on the cruise that affect each individual storyline differently. Everything that was on the mind of these characters in 1931 remain on the mind of people today, and with some allowances for changes in technology and class consciousness (for example, "steerage" isn't a cruising class anymore), the novel could be easily reset in 2016. The theme that unites the disparate stories is a delusion that somewhere else, some other time, will be better than the present, and one only need escape to find a better life (as opposed to looking present reality squarely in the eye and doing the hard work of improving it - or improving oneself). This is not The Love Boat by any means. The old adage about all that evil needs to triumph is for good people to do nothing is well illustrated, given where this ship leads historically.