[amazon_link id=”0670023191″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Author : Alex Gilvarry
Genre : Contemporary
Publisher : Viking
Source : Publisher ARC
Pages : 302
Rating : 4/5

This book is told to us memoir style, by Boyet R. Hernandez, fashion designer. Hailing from a family of doctors, Boy escapes to New York (because “one had to . . . home is where you hang yourself”), eager to get started on establishing his label (B)oy. Here he has his rebirth :

I love America, the golden bastard. It’s where I was born again: propelled through the duct of JFK International, out the rotating doors, push, push, dripping a post-U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens, breathe. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, BQE, Brooklyn Bridge, Soho, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive – these are a few of my favorite things!

Boy soon gets the hang of things, meeting people in the business, getting used to the pace of life. Quite surprised that Battery Park isn’t shaped like an Alkaline Duracell, Boy nevertheless is much taken with the city. In hearing him describe his initial experience, one can build a mental image of him – enamored, euphoric, naïve and flippant; a women’s wear designer with an eye for detail and a knack for snark :

New York’s subway is a rubber band of sexual tension, stretched and twined around the boroughs, ready to snap. I frolicked in this salacious underground, where every motion had meaning – every leg crossed, every glance up from a paperback, every brush of a shoulder or rump was a kiss blown in my direction. The porcelain Chinese beauties on and off at Canal; the thoroughbred Eastern European models of Prince, castings a-go-go; the NYU coeds of Eight Street, plump and studious. Oh, and the sexpot hipsters of Fourteenth, right off the L, like cattle, their eyes drowned in eye shadow, looking as if they had never missed a party, nor would they.

New York is, as Boy discovers, a melting pot of races, cultures and languages. But it is expensive and money is tight. Offered a relatively large amount, Boy makes 2 suits for his neighbor Ahmed Qureshi. Qureshi, happy with the suits, offers to invest in Boy’s fashion line and Boy, strapped for capital accepts, albeit with a few niggling doubts about Ahmed’s ambiguous business and questionable contacts. When word gets out that Qureshi is wanted by the law, Boy fears for his own security. His worst fears come true when he is kidnapped and taken bound and handcuffed to a prison in No Man’s Land. Release now is a distant dream.

Here in No Man’s Land nothing is certain.
When will I meet my personal representative?
When will I meet with my lawyer?
When will I be released?
You see, uncertainty is their greatest weapon. Not the chains. Not the cuffs. Not the SMERF squad. Uncertainty.
It begins with the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

When I read the blurb for this book, I was surprised at the attempted conjoining of  fashion and terrorism. And it was apparently funny. Well, funny it is. Gilvarry creates Boy with care, from the artfully placed acknowledgements section (by one B.R.H) to the slyly detailed footnotes, where we come to know of Boy’s penchant for mistakenly quoting authors and designers. The body of the book is in Boy’s voice, first person, written apparently while in prison, at the behest of his interrogator, and via it, Boy describes his life in New York in great detail. The inadvertent humor and satire is embedded in Boy’s manner and point-of-view, and in him we have our own gossipy guide to New York’s fashion world. Then Gilvarry skillfully changes tracks to give us Boy’s life-changing experience of No Man’s Land. Boy, a cheerful optimist, is driven to despair and worse. He professes his innocence, striking up restrained friendships with his guards, but to no avail. They do not believe him.

I’ve got to say that while the premise is a little hard-to-believe, Gilvarry gets my applause for writing through it with much skill. Boy is an endearing protagonist and everything he does, from the newcomer-ingenue-slip-ups to his thoughts of despair, has such an aura of honesty that it is hard to not be drawn in. I was. I hope you will be too. Recommended.