Dervishes

By Beth Helms. Picador, 320 pp, $15.50, paperback

Your father probably didn’t have a mysterious career in U.S. intelligence, and back in 1975 you and your family weren’t stationed in exotic Ankara, Turkey. But, really, don’t blame Dad if you didn’t get to roam wild in the Turkish capital or serve cocktails to inebriated adults at nonstop embassy parties, as 12-year-old protagonist Canada (yes, that’s right) does in Beth Helms’s heady, transfixing debut novel, Dervishes.

Helms (American Wives) spent her girlhood not only in Turkey but in Germany, Iran, and Iraq. And her elegant, decadently detailed prose is steeped in an insider’s-club atmosphere that gives this story of sheltered westerners in a strange land irresistible authenticity. Not to mention that we get a child’s-eye view of scandalous goings-on—and Canada is a perceptive mini-spy—plus the perspective of her neglectful mother, Grace, who’s spent too many years on the foreign-postings circuit.

We see little of Rand, emotionally distant husband to Grace and a collusive but largely AWOL father to Canada, his covert comings and goings signified by the disappearance and reappearance of a suitcase in the closet. But Helms delivers a darkly mesmerizing mash-up of narratives: secrets and lies; a malevolent houseboy; a riding instructor whose breath smells of “tobacco and crushed orchids”; some illicit baby-selling; and, most evocatively, the cruel head-games that go on between pubescent girls, between adult women—especially those stuck in a claustrophobic existence—and between mothers and daughters.

Self-absorbed Grace, given to foolishness, doesn’t exactly inspire empathy, but Canada’s adolescent discoveries are fascinating and haunting. At her friend Catherine’s apartment, she watches the beautiful houseboy who folds the “panties and delicates” and gives Catherine candy—“payment for some dark thing growing between them”. “Our parents—those adults we shared rooms with, under whose loose, sporadic authority we lived—were generally disinterested in us,” she observes dryly. Canada sees that their transient lives allow Grace to continually reinvent herself into someone “fresh, innocent, blameless”. We see that, for now at least, these two are “spinning in place”—mother-and-daughter whirling dervishes.