MIDNIGHT AT SEA
by Hoyt Rogers with Artemisia Vento & Frank Báez
Rogers continues his lengthy account of a fictional journalist and her fictional island in his second literary novel in a trilogy, following Sailing to Noon (2023).
The island of Canuba lies in the Caribbean Sea, due south of Puerto Rico. Although it’s somewhat bigger than its more famous neighbor, the average reader might be forgiven for never having heard of it—indeed, one might think “there’s a worldwide conspiracy to keep Canuba off the map.” Long ruled by foreign powers and native autocrats, it’s most notable for “rum, baseball, sugar, beaches, and easy sex”; its own form of dance, the cambuca; and as the chosen home of Sicilian-born, Princeton University-educated journalist Chiara Trigona. The protagonist of Rogers’ previous novel, she appears in this one as the addressee of monologues by five people who loved her over the years. There’s the boisterous, ribald Lamia Metaxa, once Canuba’s premier cellist, as well as one of its most prolific lovers, who now, in the aftermath of a mental breakdown that ruined her career, recounts her years as Chiara’s closest friend and sometimes inamorata. There are the three Miranda brothers, the sons of a prominent diplomat: Virgilio, a world-renowned painter who pined after Chiara for years and who turned his own self-destruction into his artistic opus; Horacio, a sesquipedalian composer who rhapsodized Chiara in high literary style and eventually became a monk; and Catulo, a choreographer who had a fling with Chiara in college, although he was primarily interested in men. Then there’s Amado, Chiara’s plainspoken paramour whose death cast a shadow on the rest of her life—although it doesn’t prevent him from breaking into other people’s narration from time to time to say his piece.
Rogers’ novel takes the form of four long chapters, each of which moves backward in time by section toward the moment when the speaker first met Chiara. The time and place of the telling is somewhat mysterious—it turns out that Amado isn’t the only narrator who’s shuffled off this mortal coil—and each speaker is given to digressions about art, history, and politics with only a thin connection to their Sicilian muse. Even so, the author renders each voice with such specificity and vivacity that readers will be content to accompany them through whatever territory they wish. One section of Virgilio’s monologue takes the form of a 13-page poem, narrating Chiara’s trip after drinking a hallucinogenic tea; in another, Lamia’s synesthesia causes her to imagine her cello metamorphosing into a giant penis, mid-performance. The sharpest writing is often the most direct, as when Chiara gazes out at the ocean and says to Lamia, “I’m grateful to you for this sea. Yes, it’s a gift from you. I’m still in love with the fickle Caribbean, in all its varied moods. On sunny days like today, it’s a thousand tones of blue and green, from midnight to aquamarine.” Canuba may not be real, but in Rogers’ evocation of its history, its art, and its denizens, he captures something of the irrepressible invention and intoxication of Caribbean culture.An endlessly immersive and at times awe-inspiring middle volume of a postmodern epic.