Review by Mack Hassler
“Special Agent Gracie Hart … is eager to be the next Miss United States … Sandra Bullock stars as an [undercover] operative posing as a contestant In order to ferret out a terrorist targeting the event” — Product information for the film, “Miss Congeniality” (DVD 2000)
“That is why it was called Babel—because the Lord confused the Language of the whole world … ” Genesis 11 :9
Many centuries after God’s destruction of the Tower of Babel, due to the fear that arrogant mankind, who had just been evicted from the Garden of Eden for a similar transgression of pride, God gave us the cleverness to invent multiple languages and spread confusion among the variety of expressions. Even in the tiny and nearly invisible village of Amasa, Michigan, halfway between L’Anse in Baraga County and Crystal Falls in Iron County (I have been there: a post office and about three streets), because of our inventiveness with electricity and cable television, the language of film is a part of the confusion. I am convinced that it is very clever and inventive of Jackson to mix us up between the sophisticated and troubled young Hollywood actress and his young Niki, who works undercover to expose a Patriots organization much more well-organized and potentially brutal than Trump’s MAGA. We live in a much more complicated “Eden” than the descendants of Adam and Eve— I should think part of God’s plans for his newly-created creatures.
Nikki Undercover includes many scenic details that could be translated well into film language. He opens quickly with fast-moving details of his FBI agent, Ashley Prescott, who has worked years undercover as Niki Foster up at the Dupont Circle stop of the DC metro and Union Station contrasted with Niki’s quick trip up to a Fargo-like visual desert as in the film by that name Fargo (1966) with all its Minnesota brutality. She has to maintain her cover in DC and look for her missing father in the UP like North
Jackson writes at the back of the book a vivid author’s note for us and what concerns he has – his interest in paramilitary groups. His fictional creation here PFF “Patriots for Freedom” … is much more frightening than most such as “The Ku Klux Clan” But we only see its seeds in this Nkiki novel . There are more. Jackson loves to write and has an “acclaimed book on contract Bridge: “One Trick at a Time: How to start winning at bridge.” Contract Bridge is a version of the game where all the players play the same hands–boards are dealt before each session so that there is no complaining about bad cards. In other words, the card game that Jackson plays during the long winter in Amasa [his dedication for this novel reads “For all the women in my life” seems to be a perfect motto for the basic plot of concealment and stratagem.
In fact, I am convinced that the two epigraphs at the start of this review is a dynamic so uniquely human reaching back to Homer and his storytelling about the Trojan War, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” Languages are complex, and going undercover and concealing our identities are essential aspects of our humanity. Thanks to God. It is a gift given to us with the fall of the Tower of Babel and has given us generations of long storytelling for the long dark of Amasa and for the tedium of our wanderings “East of Eden.” This Steinbeck novel is one Jackson must have enjoyed.
Niki Undercover, by James H. Jackson (2025 Wolf’s Echo Press, P.O.Box 54
Amasa, MI 49903) 295 pages, pbk, $19.95
