published 1997; hardback 1997, Tor

Max Trader, a instrument maker, wakes up one morning to find that he's a different person. Completely different, as in having an entirely unfamiliar body. Trader's new body formerly belonged to Johnny Devlin, a handsome, untrustworthy rake who has managed somehow to take over Trader's body, and with it, his life. Trader is now stuck with Devlin's problems, and in short order he's harassed by Devlin's ex-girlfriend (whom Devlin owes money), evicted from his apartment, and out on the street.

Not a bad story, even if it's been done before. Unfortunately, like too many other fantasies of its kind, Trader suffers from a disease that I'm beginning to call Creeping New Age Smugness. Symptoms in this case include: characters whose only purpose is to ooze compassion while giving other characters advice; the appearance of an all-knowing Native American shaman/homeless person; a high occurrence of coffeehouses; name-dropping of obscure folk tunes; and an emphasis on returning to the "old ways," before the world got mean and modern.

One of my friends who read this book complained that it seemed like a big in-joke for Charles de Lint fans. I can see her point. Many of Trader's characters have appeared in other books and thus are not really introduced, so readers who aren't already familiar with their histories are going to have a more difficult time keeping up. Likewise,Trader is devoted to philosophical pontification on the nature of life and art, a topic that has been thoroughly covered in de Lint's earlier books, in particular Memory and Dream. Further exploration of the subject might be interesting to hard-core fans, but stultifying to casual readers. Curiously, though de Lint has used his books as a vehicle to express his opinions on a range of social issues from racism and poverty to homelessness and child abuse, young people are exempt from compassion in Trader. As one character muses while watching a crowd of teenagers: "Many of them were still children, Lisa found herself thinking, but not any kind of children she'd ever known. They gave off a a very real sense of danger -- like once-domesticated animals gone feral." Throughout this scene and others, the whole message seems to be that only young people who are throwbacks to another age are trustworthy; the rest are delinquents and criminals. This ticked me off. In short, Trader breaks no new ground. It draws predictable conclusions and spins on to a predictable ending. As much as I admire de Lint at his best, I had the feeling that he could have written Trader in his sleep.

Review by Sara Lipowitz
Reviewed May 26, 1997

ISBN 0-312-85847-7

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