New West Book Review

Alan Gottlieb’s “Ultimate Excursions”

By Paula Younger, Guest Writer, 9-12-08

Ultimate Excursions
by Alan Gottlieb
Paandaa Entertainment
323 pages, $16.95

Alan Gottlieb, author of In The Shadow of the Rockies, a book about the inaugural season of Denver’s Major League Baseball team, makes his novel debut with Ultimate Excursions, published by Boulder’s Paandaa Entertainment.  Gottlieb lives in Denver and has been a journalist and public education advocate for over twenty-five years, and has worked for The Denver Post, but Ultimate Excursions takes place in Ecuador, Peru, as well as some less exotic locations in the United States, including Denver.

Ultimate Excursions is a middling thriller with potential to be a better book.  Tim Lake, the narrator and protagonist, is a recent college graduate who decides to join the Peace Corps in Ecuador because of an ad he sees with a young guy in an African village flanked by two children who smile at him adoringly.  The book starts during Tim’s trip to Cuzco, Peru with Mark Miles, a fellow Peace Corps employee and an all around charming guy, who dies from a cocaine overdose in their buck-a-night room while Tim watches, immobile. 

The haunting description of Mark’s death is by far Gottlieb’s best writing in the book.  Before long, Miguel, the shadowy Peace Corps director of the agricultural programs, pulls out a wad of money in the Peruvian police captain’s office and gets Tim out of Peru and the Peace Corps on the condition that he never tells the truth about how Mark died.  Of course, it isn’t that easy for Tim and there is more to the story.

The bulk of Ultimate Excursions focuses on Tim’s life after Mark’s death and how the cover-up separates Tim from the people who care about him and wrecks his life.  Eventually, he makes a journey to see the people he has wronged and revisit that sad buck-a-night Peruvian room to finally move forward in his life and learn the truth.  There are nice surprises scattered throughout, especially at the end, but to get to those good moments the reader has to wade through the flagging middle.  Tim is whiny, masochistic, angry, and wrecks people’s lives.  It’s fine to have an unlikable narrator, but the writing and the story must be strong enough to hold our interest and Gottlieb doesn’t deliver.

If Gottlieb had used more fiction writing tools, such as sensory details, deeper characters, and stronger dialogue, this would have been a more vivid experience.  He has too many lines like, “I felt profoundly thirsty and weary.” But as readers we should know this because we’re feeling it with the character.  Instead, we’re just being told.  When the story takes place in Ecuador and Peru, Ultimate Excursions is more of an engaging read.  Gottlieb describes these places well and has some great scenes, including a disturbing dogfight, but a lot of the characters sound like each other and the big moments feel forced.  At times the writing does elevate and I was in the moment with Tim, but then the dream would stop and I would be forced to see the seams.  The direction and shape is good, the emotion is not.  We should have been on this trip with Tim, not watching from the sidelines Gottlieb could have used more intriguing details and taken advantage of the past tense to help propel the story forward.  Tim has already lived this story before he tells it to us, yet Gottlieb rarely makes use of this to build suspense and guide us along.

There are too many moments when major and minor characters pontificate.  At one moment, Willie, a former Peace Corps co-worker and friend, has a concussion, is in the hospital emergency room, yet goes into a monologue about the problems with his life and wife while holding an ice pack to his head.  So many of the characters take center stage and spill everything they have to say, announcing what the story is supposed to be about.  Even a minor character that returns at the end of the book goes off on a speech.  This takes tension and interest out of a scene.  Sometimes Gottlieb overemphasizes the same details instead of letting them subtly recur.  After I read about a dam metaphor for the umpteenth time I wanted to reach into the book and slap Tim.  Instead I set Ultimate Excursions down for a while.

I was most interested in the fleeting moments when Tim took on the persona of his dead friend, Mark, the charismatic former Syracuse soccer star who is the catalyst for the story.  The idea of trying on another person’s identity is interesting and could have been used more.  The most insightful line in the book doesn’t come during Tim’s hallucinated radio call monologue while freezing in his car, or in the Peruvian hotel room with some foreigners.  It is a quick line towards the end: “I had been a peripheral character in someone else’s story.” Tim could have used more moments of honesty and insight, something distilled and interesting, instead of pompous self-pity and destructive behavior.  Gottlieb also has a lovely, heartbreaking moment where Tim imagines what Mark would have been like if Tim had been able to save him.  Still, my favorite scene happens when Tim returns to Peru and calls himself the Second Gringo.  I won’t ruin the surprise, but the humor, action, and suspense work well.  My favorite line comes from Alasardo, a cancer-ridden rebel and drug runner, who says, “I have now conversed with two gringos in the past two days, and that is two too many.”

Those who stay with Ultimate Excursions will be pleasantly rewarded.  The story picks up pace again and the end has a good surprise that is worth reading to find out.  Gottlieb has a solid story here with plenty of interesting elements.  Hopefully on his next foray into fiction he will delve more into his characters and sensory details to create a more vivid world so that we will be traveling along with his characters.  In the moments he accomplishes this, Ultimate Excursions functions on a deeper level.

Paula Younger is a Denver-based writer and teacher for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop whose work has appeared in The Ledge, Georgetown Review and other publications.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.