E-mails from the Edge

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Paradise is a dangerous place. And Bali's brand of paradise, even before the October nightclub bombings that killed 191 people, has long been a thin, seductive facade. When you're given everything you think you want—blue skies, a hut on the beach, a bag of happy pills, a hardbody to have your way with—there's little to keep your more destructive yearnings and frailties from consuming your life. Jamie James' first novel, Andrew and Joey: A Tale of Bali, paints a vivid portrait of the island in its prelapsarian state—and shows how sour things can turn as his largely unsympathetic characters fall from Eden.

Told through 365 days of breathless, gossipy e-mail exchanges, the novel takes us inside the inboxes of aging Broadway dancer Joey Breaux and Andrew Tan, his boyfriend of 14 years. And what a catty, campy, heady world it is. At the beginning of the novel, Andrew and Joey are as married as a gay couple in America can be. Joey is an arty, tempestuous, hot-blooded Cajun and Andrew a sweet, meek, well-organized Asian American. Joey, at the make-or-break moment of his ballet career, wins a prestigious grant to study Balinese dance and leaves Manhattan's West Village for the island with Andrew in tow, hoping to create a ballet that can make him the next Balanchine.

Joey choreographs a modern ballet based on the true story of expatriate German painter Walter Spies, who arrived in Bali in 1927. Spies single-handedly established Ubud as a bohemian destination, but he was later jailed for buggery by the then colonial Dutch authorities. Joey casts himself as Spies and finds a teenage Balinese dancer to play the painter's 16-year-old boyfriend. A rave pre-performance review raises expectations within the New York art world. But the show bombs when it moves to the big city, and Joey's life unravels. Bali has unleashed his naked ambition and insatiable vanity, which lead to his downfall.

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James, an American now living in Jakarta, must be a fabulous e-mail correspondent. At times heartfelt, at times bitchy, at times full of lies, the messages he pens for his characters positively hum with bon mots. Formerly a critic for The New Yorker and author of a tome called The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe, James spent 1999 living in a bungalow in Bali observing what he calls the "fairy-dust world" that is expatriate life. The offspring of that year is a fun, slightly trashy novel that's quick and pleasurable to read, not least because it gives you the voyeur's thrill of trawling through all those private e-mails.

And though it seems to be little more than a confection, the novel provides a strangely haunting glimpse into the world of exquisite illusions that Bali was until so recently. For the rafts of foreigners who for decades have washed up on her shores, Bali before the bomb was innocent in the same way a Russ Meyer film is innocent—without self-reflection or guilt. "What I love about Bali," writes Joey, "is that you can do whatever the hell you want as long as you don't hurt anyone else." That was false then, and it's false now. Someone always gets hurt. What the bombings did was shatter that idyllic fantasy forever.