Book Review - Exiles in Eden: Life among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession By Paul Reyes
I can't think of a more promising premise for a book than the experiences Paul Reyes narrates in "Exiles in Eden: Life among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession." Reyes centers his memoir around experiences in his father's business, which involves "trashing out" -- that is, emptying and cleaning -- houses that have been foreclosed upon when their owners went bankrupt or otherwise defaulted on their payments. Working with banks and realty companies, but surrounded by the debris of ruined lives, Reyes has a unique perspective on the victims and perpetrators of the recent housing crisis.
Reyes holds a degree in fiction writing and it shows: "These were starter kits to the [American] dream, their privacy fences tagged with graffiti, their roofs sprouting satellite dishes." He is fascinated by the detritus of lives left behind for the trash-out crew: "The owner's name was Sue, a fact gleaned from the pile of bills and letters left on the bedroom floor ... she had inherited money from a will ... and was collecting Social Security. ... She'd scribbled epigrams and lyrics on index cards and coupons: 'Words express both the best & worse of life' ... 'She walked across his heart like it was Texas...'"
It wasn't too far into the book that I began thinking that this kind of attention to detail would work as well, or better, as a novel. Reyes is working with two Puerto Ricans, one an evangelical Christian who makes pronouncements on God and destiny, the other his mostly silent, verbally abused partner. They work in all kinds of neighborhoods, though mostly poor ones. Reyes asks the neighbors about the people who had lived in the houses. He tracks down one of them, a deacon at an African-American church. He tries to save another from becoming homeless. He accompanies an organizer who moves homeless families back into foreclosed properties. I longed for a plot to tie these fascinating but disparate elements together: I wanted Reyes himself, the central character, to go through some kind of change of understanding or achieve greater maturity.
Instead, Reyes casts himself as the more-or-less objective, unchanging observer: "I have no excuses, other than naivet