Dante's Indiana

July 19, 2021
Boyagoda’s playful if smug second installment of a planned trilogy (after Original Prin) follows a hapless middle-aged Canadian academic through an outlandish career change. Prin loses his job at 41 when his college shuts down. With their house undergoing renovation, his American wife and kids have departed for Indiana, where he joins them and finds work helping to design a theme park modeled after Dante’s Divine Comedy, and attempts to win his wife back from the Mormon ex-boyfriend who is making moves on her. The theme park project, always precarious, runs into trouble when a boy named Garyon is killed by police in Chicago, and anti-racist protestors surround the park on the assumption that the name’s similarity to Geryon, the beast whose name they’ve given to the primary roller coaster in the Inferno section of the park, is somehow related. The thin plot gives Boyagoda a chance to indulge to the point of overload in crafting whimsical names and descriptions of theme park rides, and to paint a scathing portrait of an “inland America” populated by child abusers, opioid users, and clueless fundamentalist Christians who are trying to invent chastity pills. The satire may resonate with sympathetic readers, but the underdeveloped characters won’t. In the end, this is fluff with very little substance.

July 15, 2021
The second novel of a projected trilogy (after Original Prin, 2018) is a satire set behind the scenes of a Middle American theme park based on The Divine Comedy. Prin, a Sri Lankan Canadian professor of English and a devout Catholic, finds himself in a personal purgatory: semiestranged from wife and kids, semi-homeless, semi-jobless. Hungry for money and purpose, he accepts an invitation to Terre-Haute, where he lectures handfuls of auditors at community centers and big-box stores on The Divine Comedy. Afterward Prin is recruited as a consultant for Dante's Indiana, a Christian amusement park that's the "retirement project" of a wealthy packaging-company owner named Charlie Tracker; he's also enlisted as an informant by Charlie's son, Hugh, who's recently taken over the company. One of Prin's innovations is to base the park's central roller coaster on Geryon, the monster who in the Comedy is the very face of fraud. (His visage is that of an innocent man, but his body is part reptile and part hairy beast, with a scorpion's stinging tail.) This goes horrendously awry after a young Black man coincidentally named Garyon is killed by an off-duty police officer. When an employee leaves the park project--they've recently partnered with an evangelical ministry that runs a Kentucky Bible park in which humans and dinosaurs frolic together, a literalism too far--she informs the press that the park's centerpiece will be a black-faced homophonic monster from the jaws of hell, and protests begin. Meanwhile, another controversy brews; Hugh Tracker is trying to save his business by making blister packs for the opioid painkillers that are ravaging the Midwest. The novel's comedy can be overbroad or scattershot, but Boyagoda keeps things moving quickly and imaginatively. He skewers hosts of sinners along the way, but the wit has a winsome empathy behind it. A rollicking, inventive, mostly successful satire--with a vein of seriousness and sadness underneath.

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