Romeo and Juliet in the rust belt

By Bathsheba Monk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 272 pp. $25.

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Reviewed by Martha Woodall

For her first novel,

Nude Walker

, Bathsheba Monk gives readers a Romeo-and-Juliet tale set in a rust-belt pocket of Pennsylvania she calls Warrenside.

Instead of Capulets and Montagues, Monk gives us Warrens and Asads, facing one another across economic, religious, and cultural barriers. And instead of 16th-century Verona, she gives us a 21st-century American community whose face is changing to the accompaniment of fear and bigotry.

It's a rewarding read.

The Warrens, who were among the region's original Protestant settlers, became steel barons who not only operated the now-defunct mills that fueled the area's economy but also owned most of the land and ran everything from the electric company to the country club.

While the Warrens' wealth and influence have faded and the fortunes of Warrenside itself have declined, Edward Asad, a wealthy, enterprising Lebanese immigrant, has moved in with his family and opened the Lucky Lady strip club. He's also bought up distressed properties with an eye toward remaking the downtown as an entertainment center with one of Pennsylvania's newly authorized casinos.

Even though the Asads are Maronite Catholic, Edward Asad has persuaded his Princeton-educated son, Max, to join the local National Guard unit, the 501st, to demonstrate the family's post-9/11 patriotism and counter suspicion that the Asads are Muslim terrorists, or at least sympathizers.

The novel opens in 2004 as the 501st returns from a yearlong deployment in Afghanistan. The unit's members include Kat Warren-Bineki, the last of the Warren clan, who joined to defy her mother and to deflect pressure from her longtime boyfriend, Duck Wolinsky, to marry.

"Of course, I loved Duck, but I didn't feel passion, which I thought was like you had to be with that person or you would kill yourself, like Romeo and Juliet," Kat confesses early on. "With Duck I never felt that desperation. But wasn't that a good thing?"

When Max and Kat fall in love, she immediately recognizes what was missing in her relationship with Duck. Naturally, both the Warren-Binekis and the Asads and all their friends oppose the romance.

Monk, the author of the short-story collection, Now You See It . . . Stories From Cokesville, PA., has assembled a colorful, slightly loopy cast of characters, including Wind Storm, a half-Lenape, half-Swedish shaman who uses sage and sweet grass to evoke visions; Edward Asad, an expert on pre-Islamic, Arabic, and Persian literature whose mistress is the most popular stripper at his club; and Kat's father, Mike Bineki, who devises a scheme to embezzle from his former employer.

Then there's Kat's mother, Barbara, a schizophrenic who lugs around a tattered copy of the Warren family history and has a tendency to shed her clothes and stroll downtown when she's off her meds.

Unfortunately, Max, who plays the pivotal Romeo role, is one of the least-realized actors in the drama. The quietly assured Lebanese-American recites Rumi and excels at backgammon and cards, but readers are not sure what makes him tick. He remains elusive - more archetype than his rival, Duck.

Along the way, there's a subplot involving toxic waste; a legend that the Lenape who were forced to relocate to Oklahoma from land along the Catawissa River will return, and a flooding of that river that mobilizes the 501st.

Monk relates it all in such bright, breezy style that the violence is all the more shocking when it comes.

The author also artfully delineates the continuing cycle of shifting power and changing ethnic landscapes that began when the first English settlers arrived at the fertile bend of the Catawissa in the 1630s and gradually displaced the Lenape.

"What looks like randomness is merely unawareness of the time it takes for the wheel to turn a click," observes Edward Asad, who had been a firm believer in his family's providence.

"Lady Luck is usually pictured on a wheel with four figures representing the stages of life: I shall reign on the left; I reign on the top: I have reigned on the right; and on the left, bottom, I have no kingdom."

In Nude Walker, Monk suggests more nuanced possibilities for Warrenside and its inhabitants.