Virginia "Gin" Mitchell is a dreamer but life on a rural Oklahoma farm in 1968 is no fairy tale world, especially with a fundamentalist grandfather who finds infraction of religious law at every turn. When she ends up pregnant by local boy Mason McPhee, Gin is shunned and finds herself no better off in her new life with her new husband in Houston, TX. Impoverished and desperate to improve their situation, Mason takes a job overseas with an oil company, one located in the arid and isolated deserts of Saudi Arabia. It is here among haboobs and locust plagues that Gin comes of age and learns that the freedom and adventure she craves will continue to elude her and, once obtained, come at great price.
Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Kim Barnes describes "In The Kingdom of Men" as "part cautionary tale, part adventure story". The novel feels like a veiled treatise on feminism and religion. The author has many feelings about the latter - she ran away from home and a devout Pentecostal fundamentalist father twice in her youth. What she hasn't lived is the oil compound life and her information is culled from her aunt and uncle, employed and housed by Aramco in the 1960's. I found her interview on The Diane Rehm Show and her musings on her book and her own life more interesting than the book itself.
Her story arc is limp. The vast majority of the book is spent developing Gin and her relationships with the other characters. Gin's naiveté and repression at the hands of her grandfather make her easy to root for in the beginning but her sudden change in demeanor and scant education on life beyond the Abqaiq compound damages her character growth. She goes from one insular lifestyle to another and though she breaks free from time to time, it's not enough to mature her. Mason is a hard character to understand or sympathize with because, like Gin, the reader is as in the dark as her about what goes on in his head and at his job. His sudden leap into company politics is far-fetched. The relationship between Gin and Abdullah the Bedouin is a curious one; Barnes teases the reader with romantic undertones only to leave them lie at book's end. Her friendship with Yash the Punjabi houseboy is an odd one too - it's so mentor/student that it's cliché. And while we're on the subject of clichés, her inexplicably instantaneous rapport with Ruthie Doucet reeks of them - naïve and socially inept fundamentalist Christian country bumpkin befriends brash, outspoken, hard drinking, chain smoking modern pampered Jewish woman.
By the time Barnes gets down to brass tacks, the novel is nearly at its end. **SPOILER ALERT** It is implied in the book's opening passage that Mason is blamed for a woman's death but the reader never learns what becomes of him or Ruthie's husband Lucky. Gin ends up a peripatetic and woeful woman, wandering a country in which she never intended to be. There is zero closure, nothing and no one to solve the mystery hinted at in the beginning. It is the book's biggest failure. **END SPOILERS**
I was really hoping I would find a gem in "The Kingdom of Men". I delight in finding those diamonds in the rough that don't get the publicity of other books and of being the one who spreads the word about them. Unfortunately, the only thing worth mentioning regarding this novel is Barnes's adeptness at description and setting and it is not enough to save a sagging story. Not recommended.
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