Rayna Prohme is a woman with a mission. Together with her husband Bill, a journalist, the couple travels to China, which is in the throes of a great, internal struggle between the Kuomintang (led by General Chiang Kai-shek) and a group of regional warlords. The nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is allied with the Kuomintang - and together, their goal is to crush the warlords and unify China under one government.

The time is 1927. Both Rayna and Bill are committed leftists. Rayna sees the revolution in China as a struggle for freedom that can both unify and strengthen it, much in the same way that the 1917 October Revolution (and the subsequent Russian Civil War) culminated in the creation of the Soviet Union. Rayna is in her early 30s, a redhead from Chicago, and at times rather headstrong. But that is only because she believes in the freedom struggle and in Russia's role in China. That is how she manages to make the acquaintance of Mikhail Borodin, the head of the Soviet mission. Rayna ingratiates herself with Borodin and develops a deep attachment to him. Their relationship is a rather understated one - at least that is the impression I formed about it. Rayna also strikes up a friendship and working relationship with Madame Sun, the widow of the great Chinese democrat and revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen.

All the while, Chiang gathers up his forces and brutally breaks the power of the warlords. In the process, the Kuomintang and Communist alliance shatters. Stalin orders the Soviet mission out of China. Rayna at this point is set on going to the Soviet Union to learn to be a fully pledged Bolshevik, which she feels will make her more useful to Borodin and to China. What next ensues in the novel makes for an interesting set of events that are both bewildering and momentous. For that reason, I would strongly urge any reader of this review to take up "RED YEAR" to get the full story, elements of which reminded me of André Malraux's novel, "Man's Fate", which was also set in China during the 1920s and has the same philosophical, revolutionary themes.

“A Desire Path” is a rare gem of a novel. It offers an intriguing blend of political beliefs and personalities from the perspectives of 3 ordinary people whose lives paralleled the labor union movement of the New Deal Era, the “Red Scare” period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and on to the Civil Rights Movement and the tumultuous 1960s.

The novel begins in Washington in 1934 with 3 people chatting excitedly over dinner in the Tollman house. There is Andy Craige, a labor organizer from Arkansas, who worked for the United Mine Workers; Anna Mae Sloan, a journalist and writer with strong leftist convictions, whose political consciousness began in the 1910s and were heightened during the decade she spent in the Soviet Union. While not a Communist, Anna Mae saw her role as extolling the virtues of the Soviet system, though she wasn’t blind to its shortcomings. And there is Ilse Tollman, who hails from an affluent background in New England and is married to a lawyer making a name for himself in the Roosevelt Administration while representing union interests in private practice. Andy had previously known Anna Mae (who liked to feel that she could charm the socks off of any man she fancied and get her way with others in furtherance of her career) and wasn’t exactly thrilled to see that she was there. The last thing he wanted to do was “talk to Anna Mae, from whom he had parted on not very good terms some dozen years before. But he did want to meet this Ilse Tollman, whose name rang a bell, and when he voiced that thought they all had a good laugh --- tollman, rang-a-bell.”

This meeting between Andy and Ilse would prove to be pivotal in shaping the course of both of their lives. For what began there as a budding, mutual attraction developed into a fiery, passionate love affair. What I liked most about this novel was the way it was fairly evenly told through the eyes of Andy, Anna Mae, and Ilse. As a reader, I got a tangible sense and deep appreciation of the 3 of them as individuals because of the challenges they faced over time for their political convictions and life choices. This is no polemical tale which makes some novels heavily layered with political ideology and belief a bit hard to ingest and enjoy. Here is a novel about real people who want to make something meaningful of their lives through involvement in larger political movements that defined the eras through which they lived, loved, and struggled to survive and thrive.

“A Desire Path” is illustrative of the dynamics associated with the “human triangle” and what is perhaps its inherent stresses. This makes for a richly engaging novel.    

This novel is of a life lived by Penny Joe Copper, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and came of age during the labor unions' struggles of the 1910s. As a reader, I am not overly fond of novels that are "narrator-driven." I prefer for the novelist to present a full cast of characters who are free to express themelves, and so breathe life into the novel. So, when I began reading "A Snug Life Somewhere", it was somewhat slow-going for me, with Penny Joe as narrator. But at the same time, I was being given a fascinating education about the U.S. labor movement of 100 years ago that drew me closer into the novel. One of the key historical events that shaped Penny Joe's life was the death of her younger brother Horace in a "union tragedy known as the Everett Massacre" of November 1916. Out of this tragedy, Penny Joe became involved with a number of people active in the labor movement and Socialist Party.

With America's entry into the First World War in April 1917, Penny Joe and her "Svengali", Gabe Rabinowitz --- a dark, curly-haired radical activist and unabashed self-promoter possessed of an overinflated ego --- left the Pacific Northwest (Gabe was evading the draft) for Mexico, where they sat out the war and planned (with a number of revolutionaries they met in Mexico City) their return to the U.S. to help bring about a revolution similar to the one that brought Lenin to power in Russia in November 1917.

A month after the Armistice, Gabe and Penny Joe make it back into the U.S., establishing themselves in Chicago, itself a hotbed of social fervent. While there, Penny Joe finds her old love from the Northwest, Marcel, an aspiring violinist. But it is fated to be a short meeting as Penny Joe sneaks away (with a special object coveted by her Svengali) from the apartment she shared with Gabe (he was away on "political business") and made her way to Wisconsin, where she found a job and stayed for a while. Eventually, fearful of being "found out" by Gabe, Penny Joe decides to return to the Northwest to take up a job with the local union paper, whose owner was a close friend of her. What is interesting is the encounter Penny Joe has on the long train journey to Seattle with a young lawyer in the Justice Department who headed a division responsible for finding and apprehending "foreign born radicals/revolutionaries" and promptly deporting them. (This young lawyer would later gain infamy as he went on to acquire great power and influence in national law enforcement.)

Penny Joe shares her life with the reader -- and what a long and interesting life it was, taking her from the Pacific Northwest to the East Coast and home again. That for me made "A SNUG LIFE SOMEWHERE" worthwhile when all is said and done.