Wasteland is a short novel
for young adults about the forbidden love between a brother and sister, Lex and
Marina.  She is sixteen and he is a
little older.  Readers are likely to
have a visceral reaction against such a theme, and author Francesca Lia Block
tries to forestall potential disgust by engaging in an enigmatic memoir-style
form from a variety of viewpoints.   It
eventually becomes clear which entries are supposed to be by Marina, which less
frequent ones are by Lex, and which are by a neutral narrator.   This multiperspectival approach presumably
is intended to soften the moral judgments we might have about the perversity of
the emotions, but its most striking effect is to confuse us.  Equally irksome are the trite images the
author uses in an attempt to convey teen angst.  Marina writes, addressing her brother, "You were just a boy
on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass.  But the way I saw you was pieces refracting
the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and
insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else
knew."  Lex’s entries are in
italics, but they don’t convey much about him, apart from his interest in the
poetry of T.S. Eliot.  One might hope
that reference to this poet of high culture would add to the moral depth of the
book, especially with the full quotation of his poem "Marina," which
starts with a line in Latin and uses obscure nautical terms such as
"bowsprit" and "garboard." But in fact the use of Eliot
simply makes the book seem more pretentious; insofar as the poet represents a
sense of nihilism and disenchantment with the world, his function in the novel
is more of a signpost than revelation. 
What we don’t get in the story is a deep sense of character or
motivation.  The attraction between
brother and sister is entirely mysterious, and their reaction to their feelings
is inarticulate.  Block’s use of the
shocking theme of teen incest taking a nonjudgmental, nontherapeutic attitude
is surprising and original, but ultimately her exploration of the topic is
shallow and gratuitous. 

(I’d recommend Ian McEwan’s The
Cement Garden for a darker and far better crafted novel that dabbles in the
erotics of sibling sexuality.)

© 2004 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.