Spy novel breaks down barriers

The espionage genre remains one of the least diverse branches of suspense fiction. That’s ironic, because so many great AfricanAmerican narratives have been about “passing,” and living watchfully undercover. Lauren Wilkinson’s new novel, “American Spy,” is extraordinary in a lot of ways — most obviously because it places a female African-American intelligence officer, Marie Mitchell, at the center of a Cold War tale of political espionage.

“American Spy” jumps around in time and place, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s; from Queens to Martinique to Burkina Faso. At the heart of the story is Marie’s (initially calculated) romantic encounter, while working as a contractor for the CIA, with the actual historical figure Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary young president of Burkina Faso who is known as “Africa’s Che Guevara.” Of necessity, Wilkinson has to supply a lot of political context here, which sometimes weighs down the suspense narrative.

While Marie’s assignment in Burkina Faso is filled with intrigue, seduction and double and triple crosses, the most absorbing parts of her story lie closer to home. Marie flashes back to her childhood in Queens and to her time in the 1980s as a special agent in the New York field office:

“A sense of self-importance permeated the culture. So did machismo and knee-jerk conservatism. To get by, I told my colleagues that I didn’t care about politics, which felt like a ridiculous thing to claim. … Very few of those men understood having no choice about whether they were political or not: Unlike me, they weren’t people who’d had their existence politicized on their behalf.”

Ultimately, Marie becomes so disenchanted with the insular culture of the bureau, she accepts that assignment from the CIA, which requires her to romantically entrap the married Sankara and, thus, undermine his Marxist rule over Burkina Faso. The fact that Marie takes on the assignment — despite her personal and political admiration for Sankara — speaks to the hard realities of her situation in the world. Marie is very much on her own. Her first loyalty must be to herself and, later, to her sons; she can’t afford the luxury of too many scruples.

“American Spy” is a morally nuanced and atmospheric political thriller. The climax of the novel is set in Burkina Faso, which means “Land of Incorruptible People,” but as Marie’s adventures attest, no one and nothing is ever quite that pure.

FICTION “American Spy”By Lauren Wilkinson Random House, 292 pages, $27