When I first met A.D. Thompson – or Dan for the people who know him -, author of Diner Dharma – A Monk in Trouble in West Texas, he was a lecturer at Thammasat University in Bangkok. A.D. Thompson is an American writer and former Bangkok resident born in 1971 and reared (not bred) in Texas. Diner Dharma was self-published via Lulu in 2007 and is considered by some “Thompson’s enduring masterpiece.”
Diner Dharma gathers between its covers the author’s love for folktales, many of which he had collected during his travels around the world. A storyteller himself, Dan listened carefully to the people he met in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and absorbed their insights and wisdom. Later on, Thompson regurgitated, in his own peculiar style, the stories his mind had gathered over many years and, lo and behold, he “gives birth” to a Buddhist Monk, the central character in Diner Dharma.
Following the structure of a roman à clef, characterized by the description of real life behind a façade of fiction, A.D. Thompson chooses a diner in the small town of Ataboy in West Texas as the place where a Thai Monk amazes his audience with his witty tales. The diner is a micro cosmos for the town itself, having a long chain of characters that come in or are drawn to Monk’s stories.
Red, the narrator, is a writer who is having a hard time with “an annoying writing block,” and so he decides to listen to Monk in the hope of gaining back his inspiration. Over the course of the novel, Red develops a disciple-like relationship with Monk, being maybe the only person who was privy to all of the stories he had to tell: “I was thus accustomed to have time after Monk departed, generally well before me, to write out his adventures of the day on my faux-linoleum table under the oh-so-unsubtle glare of the florescent lights that had me and the truckers not much better than pies under warmers, waiting for the tired waitress to throw us out at closing time.”
Some of the other characters of the book include: Tony, a greedy small businessman; Betty, the aged beauty queen; Chick, the lying cook; Isabela, the gossiping waitress; Rique, a Mexican busboy; Miller, the incompetent police chief; Prof, the pompous school principal and mayor; Lionel, the fire chief; Jerry, the mechanic; Pete, a married farmer involved in a love triangle with two lesbians; Mags and Martha, the lesbians; and several other passers-by.
The vague storyline that connects all the dots in Diner Dharma is the arrest of Rique for a crime he did not commit. Of course, the real criminal is known to Monk, but he lets life follow its own course. One of the most well-shaped characters in the book is Isabela, as she is the omniscient witness to all the events happening in the diner. She is a woman who mostly speaks in proverbs, such as, “If you throw the water at the jar, you spill more than you collect.” or “The heart is a vessel we can never fill.”
Diner Dharma – A Monk in Trouble in West Texas is a book that comes with a recommendation from C.Y. Gopinath, author of The Book of Answers, a novel shortlisted for the international 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. This is what he had to say about Dan’s book: “Thompson should have been on a Harley Davidson riding some arrow straight road in a blue-sky desert. This book is meant to be sipped between destination-free journeys, a few sips at each halt so that its voices may grow on you and become like diner buddies. Dan Thompson’s gift is brevity and his wit lies in the words he allows others to speak.”
After his stint in Thailand, A.D. Thompson returned to the United States to complete his graduate education and work on his next book. He is now living in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, where he is in the process of editing his second book, Notes from the Interior, which fictionalizes his experiences in Mali into a mystery. An extract from this book was recently a finalist in the United Planet essay contest from “Poets and Writers Magazine.”
Referring to the times he spent teaching in Bangkok, Dan said in an interview that, “Thailand is like no other place on earth. On the one hand you can eat frog lop on the canal banks. On the other you can buy snowboards in some of the fanciest malls I’ve ever seen! I learned a lot from my students. Many volunteered to host student athletes when our campus hosted the Universiad. I was saddened to learn that many of my female students, in general very naïve, were propositioned by the athletes. Thailand suffers from some of the worst expatriate behavior I have ever witnessed. It is unfair that my innocent students should bare the brunt of the resulting bad reputation.”
Diner Dharma is available on the writer’s website. Dan has also contributed two short stories to the New Asian Writing’s short stories anthologies The Rage of a New Ancestor (2010) and Mr. Cheng’s Silver Coffeepot (2012).
Originally published in “Bangkok Trader” (Vol. 6, No.9, August 2012)
