A Book that Makes Me Sad(dest)

It's hard for me to separate the book that makes me sad(dest) from its screen adaptation, but I don't know that I really need to in the case of Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast. They are of a piece in my mind, and that's okay.

I've seen the film (starring Harrison Ford as Allie Fox in what remains his finest performance) countless times, read the book a couple, and have the audiobook sitting around waiting for me to muster up the courage. And I need courage because this book destroys me internally, the way I imagine Magneto would rip apart Wolverine from the inside out if he was ever in the mood.

I love Allie Fox (although I don't like him). I love his genius, the way he acts on his vision of the world, his thirst for proof (of his vision that the world can work and the inventions he brings into the world), his fierce self-belief, and his powerful anger.

His journey through the eyes of Charlie — the son who, at first, loves and believes in him — is an ineluctably doomed endeavour. And we are asked by Theroux, at least this is what it has always felt like to me, to embrace Charle's biased views of his father. We are supposed to see Charlie's early worship of his father as the only possible response to Allie's "abusiveness." We are supposed to see Charlie's eventual break with his father as Charlie's awakening to Allie's "madness." We are supposed to see Allie's eventual death as deserved and pathetic.

All that is where my sadness comes in. I don't see things the way Charlie does. I feel nothing but pain for Allie's ultimate failure to escape the gravity well of his American society. I want so desperately for Allie's vision to succeed, for Allie to prove himself a great man, that when it all blows apart and he tries to pick up the pieces from less than nothing I feel frustration with Charlie's lack of faith in his father's vision and anger at what feels to me like Charlie's betrayal of Allie.

But the saddest thing for me is the hopelessness Mosquito Coast conveys. It suggests that one's culture is totally inescapable — the black hole of one's existence — and no matter how much one wants to change, wants to affect change, wants to effect change, wants change for one's children, change is impossible and all attempts are doomed.

This story leaves me devestated no matter how I consume it, yet I always go back for more.