In the Kingdom of Men

Starred review from April 30, 2012
Barnes’s latest (after A Country Called Home) is an immersive and bracing exploration of one woman’s search for freedom amid repression. Suffocated by the patriarchal strictures of her 1960s evangelical Oklahoma home, Virginia Mitchell elopes with the noble Mason McPhee. They move first to Texas, where Mason works on an oil rig, and then to Saudi Arabia, where he is fast-tracked for management at Aramco. Gin bristles against the comfortable but circumscribed lives of the Aramco wives—suspended between the libertine sexual mores of the boozy expat community and the sexless, draconian prohibitions of the Saudi virtue police. When Mason organizes the Bedouin workers against the company’s abuses and stumbles onto a deadly coverup, Gin must brave a wilderness of corporate lawlessness to save him. Gin is a delightful heroine whose tenacity animates those around her, a quality that lays the groundwork for an extraordinary adventure and unsettling conclusion. Barnes deftly teases humanity out of corruption and hypocrisy, and her language is finely wrought and her pacing masterful—Gin’s story develops languidly, then draws taut as the stakes rise. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand, Brick House Literary.

June 1, 2012
When her husband Mason gets a job with Aramco, Oklahoman Gin McPhee moves from small-town life to a wider--and wilder--world of privilege, corruption and Middle Eastern geopolitics in the 1960s. Raised by her strict Methodist grandfather after her parents died, Gin begins to define herself by an attitude of rebellion. One form this rebellion takes is to date Mason McPhee, the local Golden Boy, who quickly impregnates her in the back of a sedan. Although, much to their sorrow, the child dies, Mason does the honorable thing by marrying Gin and then, after briefly working on oil rigs in Oklahoma and Texas, accepts a position with Aramco in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia. There, while Mason is working two-week shifts out in the desert, Gin finds herself getting acquainted with bored and blase women such as Candy Fullerton, wife of the district manager, and Ruthie Doucet, who warns Gin about "uppity" houseboys and orients her about what behaviors women are not allowed to engage in outside the compound within whose walls they live. The rules include women not driving, not visiting the suqs and most of all, not going outside the gates alone. True to her rebellious nature, Gin begins to change in the exotic environment, befriending her "houseboy," a mature man named Yash, as well as Abdullah, a Bedouin with a degree in petroleum engineering. At first Mason is content with his new job--or at least content with the money that comes with it--but soon he uncovers evidence of a corrupt scheme in which both Americans and Saudis are implicated. Stressed by what to do with this information, he finds his relationship with Gin deteriorating and then becomes implicated in the murder of a young Arabian woman. Barnes writes poetically and intensely about personal conflict and subtly informs the reader about continuing Western misunderstandings of Middle Eastern culture.

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May 1, 2012

Barnes's (A Country Called Home) latest novel is about a girl, Gin, who trades on her rural Oklahoma life for a journey to 1967 Saudi Arabia. Orphaned at seven and forced to live with her strict religious grandfather, she ends up pregnant during her rebellious high school years. Her new husband, Mason, gets a job working for an oil company, first in Houston, TX, and then in Saudi Arabia. The couple move to a walled-in American compound in the middle of the desert. Gina's first-person narration is meant to show her as independent, progressive, and at times incredibly naive as she tries to adjust both to life in the compound and in the new country. Her bouts of cultural confusion, along with oil politics, lead to a crisis. VERDICT Barnes writes beautifully, but she isn't able to cobble together a coherent story. The novel's first third gets off to a strong start, but the cinematic descriptions of the desert don't make up for the weak characterization and unbelievable adventure plot. The book depends on Gin's narration, but this reader found her character inconsistent and contrived, the secondary characters no more than plot devices. Not recommended.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland, St. Mary's City

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2012
Barnes (A Country Called Home, 2008) brings her own childhood struggles with a strict, isolating Pentecostalism to her enrapturing third novel about a tough, fearless Oklahoma girl raised with religious austerity and misogyny, who finds herself living in a luxurious yet oppressive American oil company enclave in 1970 in Saudi Arabia. As a girl, Virginia, called Gin, hides the forbidden books she loves. As a teen, she gets pregnant. Honest, fair Mason promptly shelves his college plans, marries her, and goes to work on a Houston oil rig, which secures them a ticket to country-club-like Abqaig. There this radiantly attractive, generous, yet sorrowful couple runs afoul of the oil company's harsh prohibitions against treating Arabs as equals andof Muslim restrictions for women, all of which baffle and enrage Gin. Barnes animates a magnetizing cast of cosmopolitan characters, lingers over descriptions of food and clothing, dramatizes cultural contrasts and sexual tension, and brings this intense and compassionate novel of corporate imperialism, prejudice, corruption, and yearning to such gorgeously vivid, suspenseful life that the story's darkness is perfectly balanced by the keen wit and blazing pleasure of its telling. A veritable Mad Men of the desert, with the depth of a Graham Greene novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)