The Dreaming Girl

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY OCT 30, 2000

For some middle-class Westerners, traveling to exotic places can be a kind of release from everyday life and its attachments, a space out of real time to dream and act impulsively. Allen (Amazon Dream; The Daughter) captures this state well in her slight, poetic novel, in which the reader enters the consciousness of an unnamed girl traveling in Belize. The girl falls in love with a man she calls only "the German," and despite some resistance on his part, follows him from rain forest to town and back again. The dream state is conjured by Allen's almost incantatory prose style: a progression of short paragraphs, each one composed of similar short, simple sentences, most expressing the girl's feelings about her companion, their lovemaking or the jungle around them: "The girl sees a blackness before her eyes. In that blackness, she can just make out a jungle. She is alone in that jungle. She doesn't want to be alone. She looks for him. But she can't find him even though she feels his body next to hers." Allen only briefly enters the mind of the German, who has a girlfriend at home and wants to travel alone. She provides just enough concrete details about the actual landscape and people to keep the reader involved. Minor but pleasing, this dreamy prose poem may interest readers of minimalists like Gordon Lish and Lydia Davis, though Allen's work is more sentimental and less rigorous.