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Summary
Summary
Winner of the prestigious PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, And West Is West is an inspired novel about two young people who learn, the hard way, about the devastating power of new technology to isolate us from the consequences of our actions.
When Jessica, a young Air Force drone pilot in Nevada, is tasked with launching a missile against a suspected terrorist halfway across the world, she realizes that though women and children are in the crosshairs of her screen, she has no choice but to follow orders. Ethan, a young Wall Street quant, is involved in a more bloodless connection to war when he develops an algorithm that enables his company's clients to profit by exploiting the international financial instability caused by exactly this kind of antiterrorist strike. These two are only minor players, but their actions have global implications that tear lives apart--including their own. When Jessica finds herself discharged from the service and Ethan makes an error that costs him his job, both find themselves adrift, cast out by a corrupt system and forced to take the blame for decisions they did not make.
In And West Is West, Ron Childress has crafted a powerful, politically charged, and terrifyingly real scenario that takes readers into the lives of characters living in different worlds yet bound together by forces beyond their control.
Author Notes
Ron Childress started his work life in boatyards up and down the New England coast, but at nineteen, he enrolled in community college and went on to earn his BA, MA, and PhD in literature. Childress worked for several years as a communications manager for a professional association near Washington, DC, before joining his wife in her tech marketing agency. In 2000, he left the business to pursue fiction writing full time. And West Is West , winner of the 2014 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is his first novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This compelling debut novel, which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, dramatically examines the insidious role unrestrained technology plays in the moral and ethical corruption of people, institutions, and government. This is a sobering story of two people who never meet but are connected in a corrupt world, futilely hoping the corruption won't affect them. U.S. Air Force Sgt. Jessica Aldridge is a drone pilot flying missions over Afghanistan and Pakistan from 8,000 miles away. When she questions the order for a drone strike on suspected terrorists and later reveals her guilt when the missile hits the wrong people, she is disgraced and summarily discharged. To cover up the drone program and silence Jessica, the government sends the FBI after her, so she goes underground. In New York City, analyst Ethan Winter works for a large international bank creating currency trading algorithms that cash in on volatility related to terrorism. His number crunching makes millions of dollars for the bank with each car bomb and suicide attack. Then someone sabotages his algorithms, and the bank loses a fortune and fires him. The system crushes both Ethan and Jessica, but Ethan finally understands what else is happening at the bank, and Jessica discovers the truth about the botched drone strike, both connected cleverly. This is an excellent story, well told, suspenseful, and tragic. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (created by Barbara Kingsolver) combines elements of technological sophistication in both drone warfare and financial manipulation with the hip social whirl of New York and Washington. Until being discharged, Jessica Aldridge, from her Nevada base, flies drones in Afghanistan with remarkable, if tragic, success; her father, Don, is in prison in Seminole City, Florida. Ethan Winter, also recently fired, developed and employed an algorithm linking terrorist activity around the world to financial cycles, a money-making (or -losing) phenomenon for his employers. His girlfriend, Zoe, is, it turns out, neither what she appears nor what she believes herself to be. After leaving the military, Jessica embarks on a cross-country trek, chased by two FBI agents, Daugherty and Pyle, and in the course of which she is aided by a team of dying tattoo artists. Though managing all these plot strains ultimately gets a little unwieldy, for most of the way Childress manages to keep our interest while maintaining a lightly handled political posture. Character-driven thriller fans may enjoy this more than general-fiction readers.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The two main characters of this ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying novel are affected in different ways by the broad reach of 21st-century-style American imperialism. Ethan is a Wall Street wizard whose algorithms assess the influence of antiterrorist strikes on the world's markets, to the benefit of his sinister employer; Jessica is a drone operator whose decisions, made at a Nevada Air Force base, devastate the lives of far-flung innocents. Through these beleaguered characters, the book means to show us what happens to the individual when the stakes of personal responsibility are simultaneously heightened to their breaking point and reduced to mechanized functions. But while the scope of Childress's novel is impressive and its intentions sincere, its significance is more often than not undermined by its inability to portray people who engage with and speak to each other in a believable way, within believable environments. This problem is most acute in the case of Ethan, who seems more an abstract example knocked about from one plot point to the next than a fleshed-out character. An affair with a troubled woman named Zoe that carries seemingly meaningful narrative implications reads as stilted and hollow; Manhattan, which is described as "a mobile city, a sleepless city that also never lies still," comes across as a place more familiar from guidebooks than from a life lived on the ground. Though warning against adopting the view from nowhere - via drone or algorithm - Childress doesn't always provide a somewhere we can hold on to.
Kirkus Review
Award-winning novel from a first-time author. Ethan Winter works for a Wall Street bank. Jessica Aldridge is an Air Force sergeant based in Nevada. What unites them is the war on terror. Ethan has developed an algorithm that allows his employer and their clients to profit from market fluctuations caused by anti-terrorist activities. As a drone pilot, Jessica launches missiles at suspected terrorists in the Middle East. Technological innovation has given them both power over the lives of others that would have been unimaginable in the not-too-distant past; however, neither Ethan nor Jessica is a figure of authority in the hierarchies in which they operate, and both prove to be expendable. Childress has the makings of a thriller here, but he clearly has other aims. The winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, this novel is devoid of anything that even approaches entertainmentand that includes drama and emotional impact. The narrative follows Ethan and Jessica after they're cut adrift from the institutions in which they had planned to spend their lives, but the crises that serve as catalysts happen so early in the story that the reader has little sense of what it is, really, that these protagonists are losing and little reason to care. Major events happen offstage, and scenes that should be crackling with tensionsuch as Ethan's firing and Jessica's dischargeare strangely bloodless. Childress' characters succeed neither as abstract symbols nor as actual people. Ethan and Jessica may be victims of systems of corruption, but they're also victims of their own dumb mistakes; they're screw-ups, not martyrs. Socially engaged but otherwise unengaging. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Winner of the 2014 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Childress's debut novel asks listeners to consider the damage technology does to the individuals using it, as well as to society as a whole. Through the stories of Ethan, who develops an algorithm that allows his Wall Street employers to make money from antiterrorist strikes, and Jessica, a drone pilot who performs those strikes, Childress presents a broad indictment of technological advances that allow the user to act at a distance and to avoid seeing the direct consequences of his or her actions. This is a sincere and earnest book, but those qualities can-and, in this case, do-make for a novel that ends up acting at a distance itself. Ably narrated by Graham Halstead, the story makes some interesting and important claims about corruption, technology and human nature, and the responsibility of the individual in a global society. Unfortunately, there are times when those claims overwhelm the narrative, leaving the reader understanding the ethical questions without coming to understand the characters of Jessica and Ethan. Verdict Recommended for those interested more in the social conscience of the novel than in its storytelling. ["This powerful and morally chilling tale depicts the chasm modern technology can create between actions and consequences-and the effects that has on the individuals carrying out the actions": LJ 8/15 review of the Algonquin hc.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
July 2012 NEVADA, SOMALIA, FLORIDA They are twined, all but, she and Voigt. He is leaning over her shoulder, his forearm atop her chairback. His lips are so close to her ear that each breath he exhales roars like a gale. This is all she hears inside the dim trailer. The glowing screens before her keep them immobile. They are frozen except for the motion of her hand as she centers the camera. The moment is near. This time he is going to let her do it. "Aldridge. Are you ready for your first?" "Yes, sir," Jessica tells Colonel Voigt as if they are in the same room. They are and are not. Sergeant Jessica Aldridge is also eight thousand miles away, ten thousand feet in the air, and so near the figures on the ground below her that she might reach down and pick them up like dolls. They are five, outlined by their jalabiyas and the scarves that circle the glow of their faces. Jessica's squadron has been tracking them, a band of brothers, for the past two weeks as they acquired the rudiments of a device they are constructing in a desert hut miles from the nearest village and forty from Mogadishu. Tonight they must imagine themselves protected by a moonless darkness that even a hawk's eyes could not penetrate. Yet they are visible to Jessica. Irradiated by their own heat, each man appears to her as a distinct if ghostly blur. A buzz returns Jessica to the trailer. Her eyes flick toward the noise, talk from Voigt's earpiece. "That's it. We have a confirm. Go the angel," her commander says, releasing her to arm the angel, their unit's euphemism for a missile. As Jessica watches from the desert sky, the men cluster below her. Her partner, airman Bob Sanders, at his parallel station, locks the men's coordinates. A touch of Jessica's hand will give the men twenty seconds to live. They are beyond mercy. "Fire at will, Sergeant," Voigt, standing behind Jessica, says. And then he waits for her to show him what she, the first enlisted person to pilot a drone strike, will do. But Jessica takes Voigt's "at will" seriously as her will and she hesitates. She senses something in the positioning of the men. That they are all, for once, traditionally dressed signifies the impending culmination of their mission. But that they have not dispersed to various tasks in or around the hut, that they stand near to each other at some informal attention--as if huddling themselves to be most effectively blasted to bits--this gives Jessica pause. Is their mission to be martyrs to anti-American propaganda? "They're waiting, Colonel," Jessica says. "Right," Voigt replies. "It's like they're waiting for someone ." And so in the trailer they also wait . . . hovering another half hour until a three-car train of SUVs stops alongside the battered pickup that had carried their initial targets to the hut. "It's Yarisi," Voigt says. Through his earpiece he's been receiving and relaying information to which Jessica is not privy. But she knows Jabir al-Yarisi. He is a person of interest, a Yemenese suspected of bombing the British embassy in Addis Ababa. Lately he is believed to be recruiting rebels in Somalia, where Jessica's drone is. "This is the big time, Aldridge," Voigt says. "You up for this?" "I am one hundred percent up for this, sir," Jessica answers. "Good. We'll wait for a visual ID. Yarisi'll be the tall one." Men with guns exit the front and rear SUVs. After searching in and around the hut they lead the men in jalabiyas to the central vehicle. Airman Sanders relocks the coordinates. A minute passes. "Yarisi's not dismounting," Voigt says, his Carolina accent resonant. He leans closer to the screens and the glow of the monitors paints his crew cut blue. "Okay. We have a passive ID on the caravan," he says quietly. "Take the shot." Just as his command comes, a side door opens in the target SUV. Jessica's trigger hand lets two seconds pass and she sees someone hop out of the vehicle, a slight figure who is followed by her twin. Their heat outlines show them to be dressed in burkas. Jessica can even determine that the pair are also wearing niqabs , leaving only a slit for the eyes. Al-Yarisi is known to travel with his wives, some being girls not of high school age. "They're kids!" Jessica hears herself say. "Screw my eyes," Voigt responds, and then he presses his earpiece against a shout even Jessica can make out. "Fire," Voigt says, almost whispering. "That's the goddamn order out of Langley." Jessica's stomach turns. She feels a "But, sir!" rising to her lips. "Fire," Voigt repeats. Jessica's hand squeezes the launch switch and the screen hiccups as the angel takes wing. In the moment before the camera refocuses she imagines one of the young men in jalabiyas looking up at a shooting star that cuts through the night sky at a strange angle. He will shout a warning in the twenty seconds that remain. Everyone will scatter. Even the invisible man in the SUV will dive out and roll to safety. In her fantasy all this occurs. But in life it does not. After a dozen seconds Voigt quietly begins to count down from eight, as if the three of them in the trailer are all supposed to shout "Surprise!" at zero. When Voigt reaches one the silence is anticlimactic. The SUVs, the armed men, the boys in jalabiyas , and the two figures in burkas are engulfed by a soft, impenetrable halo. The heat of the explosion has blinded the drone's thermal eye. Not until dawn will anyone completely see what Jessica has done. She never will. Strike analysis is above her security classification. *** Dear Jessica, Your last letter puts me beside you at your command station. And even up with you in the desert night. But where do I start about all you have written except to say that angel is a strange name for a missile. Do you remember when I used to call you angel? You might. You were six the last time your mother and I tried to reconcile. From your letters I do not think you have changed much. You could not stand to see me squash an ant. So about your wishing that those men would have seen your angel. Your shooting star. I say that was no misguided dream. It was only your natural impulse not to harm other living creatures. You must keep those feelings alive. Beyond that I cannot judge what you have done. You accuse yourself of taking two innocent lives. But I can only tell you to think of the people you have stopped who would murder a hundred innocents for their cause. Above all you must remember it is not you alone who fires those angels. It is all of us. This whole country. But we are hiding behind you. You take the heat and we do not get burned. There is plenty of guilt to go around so don't take it all on yourself. And do not worry about me either. I am heartened by the truth that though I have done many bad things in my life they are not the crime that convicted me. I am no first degree murderer so my appeal and some other possibilities are progressing. In the meantime I read and exercise and work. The lye from my job in the laundry has burned off my cuticles but soon I hope to be shelving books in the library. In the meantime the days here in Seminole City tick by quicker than the nights. And the nights come too fast. Already I see I have just a minute before lights out to finish this letter. Bless you for coming back into my life. And thank you for the cigarette cash as you call it. But I hope this old habit of mine is not yours as well. My one wish is for you to travel a long and happy road. Your loving father, Donald Aldridge Excerpted from And West Is West by Ron Childress All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.