Strippers and Terrorists Collide in “Garden of Last Days”

Before they went on to change the world, the hijackers who flew the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center spent some time in Florida. While they were here, in order to fit in, they did what all good Floridian males do and spent extensive time in strip clubs.  This fact, apparently, was the inspiration for Andre Dubus’ “Garden of Last Days,” a tale of intertwining lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida the weekend prior to 9/11.

The main action in the book surrounds one night at the fictional Puma Club near Bradenton. (Don’t let the picture of South Beach on the cover fool you. Nor should you be duped by the claim on the back that the lives the story follows are in South Florida. References to our area are limited to some of the hijacker’s recollections of a convenience store worker in Delray and a short scene in a Ft. Lauderdale motel room). The story’s protagonist, a stripper named April, brings her 3 year-old daughter to work because her only babysitter is in the hospital.  And when a stripper brings her kid to work, only bad things can happen. Throw in an angry young local and a man on his way to hijack an airplane, and this night at the Puma club becomes about a lot more than lap dances and stage shows.

LIKE GOD SHOOK AMERICA

I won’t delve too far into the plot here, because this books plot really only serves as a vehicle to tell the stories of its characters.  Much of the writing in “Garden of Last Days” is backstory, going into sometimes too-graphic detail of how each character ended up on the Gulf Coast. And that’s really what Florida is about, isn’t it? A collection of people with not much in common, but all with a questionable backstory as to how they ended up here. Whether it’s the stripper who came south for better money, the Midwestern retiree, the bouncer who had been banned from every bar in his hometown, or even the foreigner who came here to learn to fly. Nobody’s from here, and everyone is planning to move on to somewhere else. Even if that somewhere is the afterlife.

For a Floridian reading this book, you notice how Dubus portrays the state as a sort of life stopover or end of the road. The most telling line to this effect comes from the only Florida native in the story (a product of several unfortunate sexual encounters. There’s a metaphor there somewhere), when he says “It’s like God took the United States, turned it on its side and shook it, and everyone who wasn’t attached to a job or a house fell down to the bottom.”

HUMANIZING THE MONSTERS

Aside from his acute capture of Florida transience, Dubus also does what no literature about 9/11 has done, and humanizes the terrorists. He doesn’t make them sympathetic exactly, but despite the story being told in the third person it gets inside the inner struggle of Bassam, a composite of several of the 9/11 hijackers. It examines how he struggles to understand why he feels such a strong sexual desire when he has been taught not to, and even has him questioning – however briefly – whether what he’s about to do is right. He finds himself liking many Americans and our way of life, and then forcing himself back into the mode of hating and wanting to destroy us.  His creepy curiosity during his interactions with April and his eventual hiring of a prostitute make a strong statement about the inherent hypocrisy of fundamentalism as well.

Like any book that wants to sell more than 500 copies, “Garden of Last Days” is ripe with sex, not all of it consensual. This is probably not shocking in a book that revolves around a strip club, but if you are uncomfortable with sexuality, this book should be avoided.  Also be aware that the syntax in the sections told from Bassam’s perspective is often that of a non-English speaker, so those sections are often hard to read. But if you’d like to see a side of the 9/11 tragedy that you’ve probably never thought about, “Garden of Last Days” is well worth the 535-page investment.

Related Categories: Miami: Local News, About the Author: Matt Meltzer is a featured columnist at Miami Beach 411. See more articles by Matt Meltzer. See more articles by Matt Meltzer Was This Post Helpful? Please Share It With Others! Tweet

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