Audrey Schulman's new novel "Three Weeks in December" tells two different stories in alternating perspectives that take turns chapter by chapter. In the first, Jeremy, a young engineer from Maine, travels to East Africa in 1899 to oversee the construction of a railroad for the British. The obstacles: malaria, yellow fever, jungle ulcers, worms hatching eggs in his feet, and a pair of man-eating lions that abduct the railroad workers one at a time. To further complicate things, Jeremy feels somewhat reluctant to kill these lions because then he'd have to leave the soul-nourishing company of Otombe, his fellow hunter with whom he sits side by side night after night.
In the second story, Max, a female ethnobotanist from Maine, travels to Rwanda in 2000 to find a mysterious vine that could potentially be alchemized into a beta-blocking pharmaceutical that would save tens of thousands of lives. The obstacles: Max's Asperger's, the vine's remote location, steep climbs up mountains, a family of nervous gorillas and a violent rebel group of child soldiers who execute Americans before eating them. To further complicate things, Max feels somewhat reluctant to find the vine because then she'd have to leave the soul-nourishing company of the gorillas, her fellow foragers with whom she works side by side, day after day.
Conventionally, switchback narratives of this kind show two sides of the same story, as Richard Price does in his brilliant novel "Clockers," alternating between perspectives of a detective and his murder suspect. But "Three Weeks in December" deals with two plots that are on the surface very different from one another, separated by more than 100 years. The links between them operate more like echoes, like two lions crying out to each other across the darkness. And the counterpointed differences are as interesting as the similarities. While Jeremy -- who "felt he had been born anew in Africa, with the delight of an infant in each unfamiliar sight and with the same inability to recognize danger" -- is inhabiting a defamiliarized world, Max finds herself among the Asperger's-like gorillas, whose discomfort with both eye contact and close proximity are all highly familiar to her.
The danger, of course, in books that alternate perspectives is that one story won't hold as much interest as the other, creating an impatience in the reader to get to the good stuff, or just the better stuff. And although Jeremy, even with his cannibalistic lions, can't compete with the indefatigable Max, the combined result is a beautifully written novel about extraordinary people struggling to create for themselves ordinary worlds.
Matt Burgess is the author of "Dogfight: A Love Story."
