The Imposter

Early in David Bergen’s Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, a murderer-to‑be rehearses her metamorphosis. The American expat Esther Maile is visiting Bali with Christine, a Canadian with whom she shares a duplex in Thailand. One evening, while her friend is out dancing, Esther, who dreams of inhabiting another self, “a different body,” steps into her underwear: “Very nice. She slipped into a sleeveless black dress of Christine’s and looked in the mirror and said, ‘Hi, I’m Christine.’ ”

It comes as no surprise then when, over dinner on their last night at the hotel, Christine informs Esther that she needs space — and not just for the evening. “When they returned to Thailand, Esther was to go away, disappear.” Her reasons go unstated, but the following morning, while the two women are swimming in the ocean, Christine gets caught in the surf and, after a struggle, succumbs under the waves.

Accidentally drowned? Murdered? Who’s to say? Bergen presents us with a jumbled sketch outlining both possibilities, but the entire scene is notably ambiguous. When the local police arrive — who summoned them and why remains a mystery to me — and ask Esther for her name, she tells them she’s Christine Case.

Esther returns to the hotel, where she pilfers her friend’s laptop, passport, and clothing before getting on a flight back to Bangkok. Posing as Christine, she depletes her bank accounts and informs her Facebook followers that she’s headed to an ashram: “I’ll be away from the world. Peace.” In an email exchange with Christine’s brother, a pastor named Carl, she endeavours to persuade him that all is well. When the concerned sibling insists that she call him, Esther balks. “I would love to call you,” she writes, “but I’m nowhere near civilization, except for the occasional foray into a town where I can use wi‑fi.” It’s worth noting that cellphones don’t exist in the twenty-first century of Bergen’s novel. In fact, we receive few time-stamps: “They were now two months into the rainy season,” for example. “In the hot season she found herself on Koh Samet.” There are even fewer geopolitical footholds: “They spoke of politics.” This conspicuous suppression of detail impairs plausibility and draws unwanted attention to the more farcical of Esther’s rhetorical contortions.

After the police in Bali recover a body, as well as Carl’s business card “in the woman’s suitcase,” the befuddled brother embarks on a zigzaggy search for his sister. “I have so many questions,” he says, and so might the reader. Namely, how much time has elapsed since the young woman’s death? Days? Weeks? When did the police search Esther and Christine’s hotel room? Carl’s visit to identify the corpse only brings about more confusion. “She was barely recognizable,” he tells Esther. “Except for her teeth.” Were Christine’s teeth so distinctive? Or were the authorities so convinced of the victim’s identity that they requisitioned her dental records? How many pastors actually wield business cards?

When Carl arrives at his sister’s place in Phanat Nikhom and begins to suspect Esther of foul play, she bludgeons him with a mortar and hides his corpse in a cistern. Later, with the help of Chai, who tends to Christine’s property, Esther conveys the body to a nearby pond. These passages, as well as those told from the point of view of Net Wantok, the officer handling the investigation in Thailand, are the novel’s strongest sections. We learn of Wantok’s wife, Dee, bedridden with multiple sclerosis, and of their missing daughter, Ratchaneewan, who is approximately the same age as Esther — twenty-four or so, by the investigator’s estimation. Here Bergen does a good job imbuing action with thought. When Chai hoists Carl out of the tank, the bloated body, “like a large fish,” lands “with a slap” on the kitchen floor. “Water poured from the mouth.” The definite article is perfectly bound up with Esther’s thinking. Not “his” mouth. Not “Carl’s” mouth. “The” mouth.

Repetition works in fiction when the reader feels in the reaccumulated details, in the accretion of stock verbs and vapid adverbs, a glimmer of authorial intent. This is how the world sounds, degraded and dull. When Esther meets Wantok, she observes, “He was good-looking. Older, but a youngish-looking older.” Here again, the language belongs to Esther. We don’t require a lengthy physical description of the police captain, because the repetition obtains a psychological tactility in the service of character and plot. But what about the thirteen occurrences of “looked,” “look,” “looks,” or “looking” that appear on the preceding three and a half pages? Is each of these necessary?

Wantok wears “black pants” with “a white button-down shirt” and “black polished shoes,” and so, a dozen pages later, does Chai: “He wore dark slacks and a white shirt and polished black shoes.” A few pages on, and here comes a German fellow in a “button‑up shirt that was white and needed ironing.” Within the span of three paragraphs, you’ll find that “Esther smiled easily” and “Oy had an easy smile.” An assertive coital inquisitiveness afflicts multiple characters. Christine asks, “Have you ever had sex, Esther?” Carl is asked by Esther, “You have sex when you’re sad?” Perhaps most improbably, during a therapy session with his American psychologist, Wantok inquires, “Do you like sex, Dr. Bank?”

Christine is “a teacher of English,” and so is Wantok’s wife. The phrase “a teacher of English” is curiously excessive (why not “English teacher”?) and stands out. It works once — and seems uniquely suited to Esther — but not twice, and not from two distinct points of view.

Some of this would be forgivable if Esther, who claims to be a linguistics professor on sabbatical, weren’t so fixated on righting every last lexical infelicity she encounters. “He said that he liked to grow his vocabulary. ‘Expand,’ Esther said.” And later, when Wantok refers to covering all the bases, “Esther wondered if he understood the etymology of the expression.” Now, granted, I’m no twenty-four-year-old linguistics professor on sabbatical in Thailand, but “etymology” doesn’t mean what Esther wants it to in this sentence.

Toward the end, Esther, on the lam from Wantok and recovering from plastic surgery, reflects on the blandness of her latest alias, Chris Dale. “Boring. But, of course, it was essential that she be boring.” This is an interesting admission, and one that offers itself up as a possible clue to unlocking the novel’s recursive narrative strategies. You can’t always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.