The Ghost Apple
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
At the turn of the eighteenth century, John Morehead Tripoli is marooned on the unspoiled Caribbean island of St. Renard. There, he lives for an idyllic year in a community of Carawak Indians.
Three hundred years later, the Carawak are gone, St. Renard is carpeted with banana plantations and sugarcane fields, and Tripoli himself is remembered only through his grandson, founder of New Hampshire's Tripoli College, which maintains a branch campus on the island. The college, never prosperous, has been forced to enter into a coercive financial relationship with snack food giant Big Anna® Brands, the same corporation that controls most of the land on St. Renard. Big Anna® deposes the college president, uses students and faculty as test subjects for a "dietary and mood additive" called Malpraxalin®, and hijacks the St. Renard campus for a "field studies" program.
At the heart of this twisted satire are two souls in transition. Bill Brees is a grandfatherly dean, "undercover" as a Tripoli freshman, and bemused by how things have changed since his undergrad days. Maggie Bell is an African-American student, startled into the realization that nothing really changes at all. When these unlikely friends both elect to spend their spring semesters in the Caribbean, they will see a side of Big Anna® even uglier than they could have imagined.
The Ghost Apple develops through a varied and colorful collection of documents, including tourism pamphlets, blog posts, slave narratives, and personal correspondence. Slowly these texts reveal the extent of Tripoli's current crisis, and highlight those historical crises in the midst of which the college--and the nation--were founded.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nearly 50 years after Bel Kaufman's bestselling novel, Up the Down Staircase, depicted the hectic landscape of an inner-city high school via a variety of documents, Thier's debut novel applies the same conventions to the world of higher education; specifically, that of a singular New England institution called Tripoli College. A letter from the late 18th century and a contemporary circular identify Tripoli as a school founded for Native Americans with a sister campus in the West Indies. Loopy course descriptions, the minutiae of faculty meetings, blurbs from the school newspaper, et al., create a delicious texture and form the structure of the book. The centerpiece of the novel is a hilariously deadpan chronology, full of conspicuous omissions, courtesy of a huge banana corporation; it begins with "Prehistory: Delicious bananas evolve in South or Southeast Asia." Plot comes via two odd couples. The first is an elderly dean named Bill Brees (who has gone awkwardly undercover, posing as a student, and shares his "discoveries" in a blog) and an African-American student, Maggie Bell, who becomes an unlikely kindred soul for Brees. The second couple is the two linked campus settings: the sleepy elegance of the New England environment is sharply at odds with the turbulent West Indies campus, where Bill's visit climaxes the novel. A droll comedy of modern manners, incisive without being angry, this satire within satire within satire will delight the right audience.
