White Man's Grave: A Novel

When Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan goes missing in West Africa, his father Randall and his best friend Boone Westfall begin separate quests to find him. Randall, a bankruptcy lawyer, is the warlord of his world, a shark in a fishbowl, exercising power with mad, relentless, hilarious glee; Boone, an American innocent abroad, journeys to the African bush, protected by the twin charms of the passport and the almighty dollar. In seeking Michael, both men find much more than they bargain for.Witches and witch-finders, bush devils, shape-shifters, village chiefs and politicians, judges and attorneys, and medicine men from American and African cultures populate this original, ferociously funny novel by a satirist of the first order.

From Publishers Weekly

Dooling's novel about a Peace Corps volunteer missing in Africa and the two men-his naive friend and his boastful father-who try to use American influence to find him was a 1994 National Book Award finalist. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Behind the fairly simple story of a Peace Corps volunteer missing in West Africa and a friend's search to find him, one feels that some larger significance is brooding and expects it to appear at any moment. Unfortunately, it never does. The pace is fast, the style lush, and the atmosphere slightly ominous; there is plenty of action, adventure, and suspense; but somehow Dooling has not quite managed to make it all come alive. The result has to be one of the longest shaggy-dog stories on record. The book would have been better if the author had curbed his tendency to overexpansiveness and exercised a little control of his material. A potentially good novel that does not quite make it.A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., BostonCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Dooling's novel reads like two different books--both worthwhile and engaging. One is the story of Boone Westfall, a nice young Hoosier who travels to primitive, impoverished Sierra Leone in West Africa to search for his best friend, Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps volunteer who has disappeared. Boone's story is the oft-told tale of a white in black Africa who is slow to understand that his way isn't the only way. It's filled with vivid, authentic-sounding portraits of the harshness of life in the bush and of magic, witches, swears, and counterswears. The second story is a spectacularly wicked satire about bankruptcy lawyers, personified by the missing volunteer's father. Randall Killigan, Dooling tells us, has made his name "synonymous with commerical savagery in the Seventh Circuit" and has "less and less time for nonbankruptcy irritations and intrusions," like the disappearance of his son. One of Dooling's points, of course, is to make sure readers ask themselves, Who is the primitive? Thomas Gaughan

From Kirkus Reviews

Using the unprincipled excesses of lawyers and insurers as both a background against which supposedly bizarre elements of West African culture are displayed and as a big fat target for ridicule, Dooling's (Critical Care, 1992) ethnographic thriller/satire set in present-day Sierra Leone portrays politics and witchcraft as two sides of a single coin. The novel's progress depends upon the disappearance during an eruption of political strife of Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan and upon attempts to find and save him by his father, a powerful bankruptcy warrior, and his best friend Boone Westfall, who is fleeing scut-work in a family insurance business. There's a good deal of playing to the cheap seats, and the people in the story tend to be convenience characters commanded by the plot. Boone, for instance, is innocent but cool, a morally superior white boy who is nevertheless perfectly sympathetic to the concerns of West Africans, tolerant of their strange ways, but unwilling to be conned by mumbo-jumbo in any language--i.e., a Good American. He stumbles into a land of disease, poverty, magic, and violence, but because he is resourceful and gutsy, he is able to meet all the right people, say and do all the right things, suffer sickness and torture with the aplomb of James Bond. As generous and detailed with descriptions and explanations of the Mende tribe's folkways (especially witchcraft and the ``pulling'' and ``putting'' of curses) as it is with grinning outrage at the vacuousness, folly, and cruelty of North American versions of same, the novel is laudable as a fictional travel essay, passable as an acerbic melodrama, less interesting when it tries to be profound. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club featured selections; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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From the Inside Flap

Richard Dooling's debut, Critical Care, was hailed as a masterpice, a "very funny first novel" (Beryl Benderly, The Washington Post) which readers found "impossible to put down" (Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post Dispatch). His new novel, White Man's Grave, is a fast-paced, scathingly funny black comedy that soars to Eveilyn Waugh-like hieights.Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, is missing. The search for him is launched separately by his father, Randall, a master-of-the-universe and warlord of the Indianapolis bankrupty courts, and Michael's best friend, Boone Westfall. Once in Freetown, Boone falls in with Sam Lewis, an unscrupulous Volunteer who's fed up with Sierra Leone, a country which in 1992 earned the distinction of being the world's worst place to live, according to the United Nations. Lewis leads Boone into the bush and turns him over to Aruna Sisay, "the white Mende man," a fallen anthropologist who's sworn off the rigors of fieldwork and succumed to the charms of ruling hell.Back in America, Randall receives an ominous bundle of black rags from Sierra Leone and starts to experience terrifying sleep disorders. A raving hypochondriac, he bankrolls a search for his son, while seeking a medical explanation for his nocturnal hallucinations. Meanwhile, Liberian rebels are crossing the border in the south of Sierra Leone, elections are erupting into riots, and the countryside is ruled by warring secret societies of leopard and baboon men which still practice witchcraft and human sacrifice to win political--even supernatural--power.But where's Michael?To find Killigan, Boone must negotiate witches and witch-finders, disgruntled ancestors and bush devils, bad medicine and "shapeshifters" who roam about in the guise of animals. And Randall learns that the bundle of rags may have tranformed itself into a spirit and "entered" him, causing supernatural disturbances. Both begin by wonderin if witchcraft is "true" and conclude that if it "works" it may as well be. An exuberantly funny satire in which litigation, modern medicine, and the insurance business begin to look a lot like primitive magic. White Man's Grave pillories our deepest fears, forcing us to consider the ultimate nature of evil.

About the Author

Author Richard Dooling's first novel, Critical Care, was made into a feature film directed by the great Sidney Lumet, starring James Spader and Helen Mirren. His second novel, White Man's Grave, was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award. His third novel, Brain Storm, and his fourth novel, Bet Your Life, were both New York Times Notable Books of the Year.In 2003-2004, Richard Dooling co-wrote and helped produce Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital for ABC. Under the pen name Eleanor Druse, a mystic and savant in residence at Kingdom Hospital, Richard Dooling also wrote The Journals of Eleanor Druse, a New York Times bestseller.Richard Dooling lives with his wife Kristy in Montana.

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