Review: Armpits and Underwear (A Review of Wait by Gabriella Burnham)

By Hugh Blanton

The 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White ended on a breathtaking cliffhanger leaving the shocked reader begging for a sequel. (None came.) The exquisite prose and captivating story kept the reader's rapt attention until near the end when you realize there's not enough pages to wrap this up and after furiously burning through the last dozen pages you drop the book with an agonized scream. Michel Faber, a talented writer and storyteller, left us wanting more. Gabriella Burnham's latest novel lumbers to its ending, a character looking out over the ocean at seabirds, disappointed that her last text message didn't go through because of bad reception—the "cliffhanger" so obvious the reader sees it a mile away.

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Wait is the new novel from Gabriella Burnham. Our main character Elise is away at college when her younger sister Sophie calls to say she hasn't seen their mother. Elise returns home to wait for their mother to reappear (they can't call the police—even filing a missing person report would be a violation of the family no-snitching rule) when their mother, Gilda, finally phones. She's been deported to Sao Paulo, Brazil. An ICE agent had been following Gilda on social media under an anonymous handle and when he found out she hadn't renewed her work permit set up the bust. Gilda had been working in the US for more than two decades. Renewing her work permit had just slipped her mind.

Burnham has an odd prose style, weird metaphor and simile often pop up. Describing an evening dress: "neckline drips like molasses." "Air tasted like unsalted rice." "Felt a bubble of vomit creep into her throat." Elise and her girlfriend Sheba snuggling: "Elise feels it too—her ribs, a slab of concrete." Odder still are the repeated mentions of armpits: "The man crouches into a corner to light a cigarette, smoke billowing from underneath his armpits." Then, "tucked into Gilda's armpits." Again, "her towel cinched underneath her armpits." One more time: "Elise tucks her hands into her armpits." And then there's the more than a dozen mentions of underwear including a character that changes her underwear before going out for ice cream and another that soaks her underwear in a bowl of water if her period bleeds through. No mention of if it's a soup, salad, or cereal bowl. (Billowing from underneath his armpits?)

Annoying little plot holes and anachronisms keep popping up—our main characters are young women constantly on their smart phones but they call for taxis instead of summoning Ubers. A construction crew arrives to renovate Elsie's and Sophie's house soon after their mother had been deported—they'd been evicted without knowing it, somehow missing the multiple eviction notices that would have arrived first. Keeping current with publishing trends there are two shots at Donald Trump (not mentioned by name of course) and a threat to leave for Europe if a fascist is elected to office again. After the eviction the girls get a package forwarded to them at the guest house where they are staying (Elise's girlfriend Sheba lets them use her family guest house, she's an heiress to the Play Doh fortune) but it's not clear how the post office had the address—no one knows the girls are staying there.

Elise puts her environmental science major to work by landing a job as an endangered species monitor. She's stationed on a secluded beach to protect piping plovers and their eggs from feral dogs and tourists. In another one of those irritating little plot holes, she's only there during business hours. No one monitors them nights and weekends. Maybe predators and drunk tourists stay off secluded beaches at night? I don't know—ask an environmental science major. Also in line with current publishing trends, Burnham sounds the climate change alarm, warning us of "a warming jet stream and rising sea levels." (No mention, however, of either the Obama's or the Gates's relocating their recently acquired beachfront properties inland to avoid the impending catastrophe.)

It's rare that cliffhanger endings fall as flat as Wait's does. Part of making a shocking cliffhanger is not to make a sequel so obvious. Wait had the potential to be a page-burner of a story—a working-class single mom deported after being in a country for years—but here it's ruined with trendy politics and ideology. For a more genuine experience of undocumented workers in the USA see For Love of the Dollar by J.M. Servin. No bawling over climate change or hackneyed metaphor there.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5