Word: backpacking
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...parents into spirals of anxiety and friends into paroxysms of envy, the Asia trek now elicits a shrugging, "Send us an e-mail when you make it to Kathmandu." Trouble is, no one seems to have told Tansy Harris, the self-absorbed heroine of Emily Barr's debut novel Backpack (Plume; 310 pages). Tansy is a glamorous young Englishwoman with glamorous friends and a glamorous media job who has no more direction in life than the location of the next line of coke. When her monstrous alcoholic mother dies, Tansy survives an overdose and decides to escape London for what...
...Barr may be aware of this failing, because she loads Backpack with enough neurotic angst to fill a season's worth of Ally McBeal, then grafts on a murder-mystery subplot centering around a backpacker serial killer stalking Tansy look-alikes. The murderer can be spotted within a few paragraphs of the title page, but provides a diversion from a suddenly at-one-with-Asia Tansy looking down upon the "tourists" in Bangkok or musing with unconscious irony upon "deluded Westerners" at the base of Mount Everest. Barr even includes Tansy's rambling e-mails home; most people...
...Barr has managed to throw Bridget Jones onto The Beach. But The Beach gave some insight into the backpacking scene, while Backpack rarely ventures from the tourist quarter...
...looking for fragments of U.S. bombs, which they loaded into a huge cooking pot and carried to a pickup truck. One fighter handed me a rubber jug with a strap. "Al Qaeda," he said with a nod. Arabs drink water too. Another fighter with pale green eyes carried a backpack that he had taken from a cave. It contained a stick of Mum Cool Blue roll-on deodorant. He wouldn't let anyone touch it, but he would let them sniff...
...Casey B. Weinstein ‘02 fancies himself a freestyler. “I go to school / but it ain’t cool” he said, adding “Pack a / backpack / fulla / books.” Later, inspired by Ludacris’s “Area Codes,” Weinstein kicked out this magical couplet: “3-1-3 / B-I-G.” Representatives from Will Smith have already approached Weinstein about guesting on the Fresh Prince’s upcoming album, Jagged Little Will...