Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky
The Sheltering Sky tracks the breakdowns – one physical, one mental – of Port Moresby and his wife, Kit, as they travel into the Sahara with a friend, Tunner. Kit Moresby is neurotic to an extreme, while Port is alienated from almost everything in his life.
Yet both find their downward spirals hastened by bad choices – not just bad, but stupid and unrealistic as well. It’s clear from the start that their marriage is doomed, but it’s doomed because the thinly drawn characters have no emotional intersection, so the reader is left watching each of their demises at a distance. And when one or the other (usually Port) attempts to offer some deep philosophizing, it reads as hollow, as if the character is speaking the author’s words rather than his or her own.
The shame of it is that Bowles dropped these two-dimensional beings into a wonderful three-dimensional world. His various fictional Saharan towns and oases are richly detailed, some evoking beautiful villages under blue skies, others ominous with their narrow streets and unfriendly denizens. The handful of side characters – a comical mother-and-son due named Lyle, various French colonial administrators with their own troubles and biases, a Jewish shopkeeper in the oasis where Port takes ill – are all sketched with greater clarity and depth than the two nitwits at the story’s center.
I’d love to say that this novel, Bowles’ first, represented a fine first effort upon which he’d likely improve with future works, but every evaluation of his canon lists this novel as his finest, so if you don’t care for The Sheltering Sky, you might wish to follow my example and skip the rest of Bowles’ writings.