Huh?

--said my husband, when he thought I asked him what he knew about the sex lives of cannibals.

I had actually asked him what he knew about The Sex Lives of Cannibals, a newish book by J. Maarten Troost describing his two years in Kiribati, in the Equatorial Pacific.  The miscommunication caused me to wish briefly for a set of handheld HTML flags -- like the ones a runway signalman uses, only mine would say <i> (for the right hand) and </i> (for the left).  But then I rolled my eyes and said to myself, "You have been spending way too much time on that computer."

The Sex Lives of Cannibals caught my eye recently in a bookstore, where I flipped through the first chapter and found it funny and well-written.  I got it from the library and dug in enthusiastically.  It is a riotously funny book:  I read a lot of it while I was nursing Joe to sleep in the evenings and I was afraid I would wake him up laughing.  Troost writes perceptively about his gradual acclimation to life in the developing world and his subsequent re-entry into the US.

Soon, though, I found myself checking each chapter to see how long it was.  I kept flipping to the back -- how many pages in this book again?  That's never a good sign.  Troost's writing reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace's, which might be part of the trouble.  I enjoy the first few thousand words of a David Foster Wallace piece, but then I begin to find it laborious.  The copy editing in SLOC is sloppy -- many typos and scattered solecisms -- and perhaps Troost needed more big-picture blue pencil too.

Oddly (since I read very little travel writing), this was the second book I had read this year about the region; the first was The Island of the Colorblind, in which Oliver Sacks writes about his journeys to Pingelap and Guam to see islanders with unusual neurological disorders.  Sacks and Troost seem like very different men and it shows in their books:  Sacks writes careful narratives with extensive footnotes; Troost is more haphazard and uproariously funny.  Sacks is unmistakably an outsider, but Troost begins to shuck off some of his Western-ness and think like an islander.

So I guess my verdict on SLOC is that it's flawed but worth reading.  I'm glad I read about Troost's changing perspective:  his initial dismay at the squalor on the island, his ultimate dismay at US consumer culture on their return home.  And his description of the colors and pleasures of life on a tropical atoll -- well, it makes me wonder, now and again, what's in the "help wanted" ads from Fiji.