Panorama City by Antoine Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There are two connotations of the word “idiot.” Panorama’s Oppen is not the willfully ignorant idiot, the one who holds intelligence in foul regard and ironically is proud of his stolid foundation. Oppen is the other kind of idiot, the one who’s guileless, more innocent than merely stupid. He’s the village idiot (his aunt’s words) and his “adventures,” although confined to a few small places, are a kind of modern picaresque.
Oppen doesn’t tilt at windmills, exactly, and is closer to a Sancho Panza assisting others as they assail pointless endeavors. He’s a fool in as much as he doesn’t understand the people around him are fools as well, trusting in their own trust in themselves. But unlike most of them, he’s no hypocrite, and his earnestness is genuine.
Antoine Wilson’s novel is almost as simple as his main character, and through those simple eyes we see how rural American and big city America is more or less the same when it comes to people and their small-world aspirations. The novel begins with death and ends with new life, a nice backwards trajectory, with the main character’s time in-between spent in a sort of purgatory as he finds a way to re-assert his own small-world aspirations.