Mary Amesbury has just moved into a rented house up on the Maine coast with her baby daughter Caroline. Except she hasn't, because Mary Amesbury doesn't exist, and actually the woman who's rented the house is Maureen English, a journalist from New York, on the run from her alcoholic and physically abusive husband, Harrold.
Arriving after a hasty departure from the couple's New York apartment, Maureen/Mary has only her car, some baby stuff, and a limited supply of cash. She also has some very obvious facial bruising which prompts sympathy but also attention that she doesn't really want, and her attempts to pass it off as the result of a car accident don't really fool anyone.
Mary settles into her new home, a seaside cottage in the small community of St. Hilaire, where the main business is fishing and indeed the cottage (rented to her at minimal cost by a sympathetic local widow, Julia Strout) is right next to the main mooring-place for the local fishing boats. Inevitably a young and apparently single woman attracts some curiosity and attention and fairly soon Mary is having regular clandestine meetings with Jack Strout (a cousin of Julia's late husband) who pops in in the early hours of the morning on his way to his fishing boat to tickle her clam, pop his tackle in her box, and so on and so forth. Jack is married, though fairly unhappily, to a wife, Rebecca, crippled by some sort of depressive illness. But he has no thought of leaving her and soon isn't going to have an excuse to visit any more as he'll be mooring his boat up for the winter.
Jack and Mary's secret is partly revealed when Caroline contracts a sudden fever and they have to take her to the local hospital. More seriously, the visit also entails the doctor phoning the family doctor in New York to get details of which antibiotic Caroline is allergic to (Mary can't remember). Mary is frantic that this will provide a way for Harrold to track her down, and sure enough it's only a matter of days later that a stranger is seen in town asking questions - questions like: has anyone seen a young woman with a baby? Most people are wise to what's going on and remain tight-lipped on the subject but inevitably someone blabs and in no time at all Mary is awoken near dawn not by her expected visit from Jack but by Harrold, who gets her to come downstairs with the promise of a reasonable discussion about things but then attacks her with a fork, rapes her and passes out in a chair in a drunken stupor. Mary considers stabbing him but decides that she can't bring herself to do it, and so heads out to Jack's boat where she knows there is a gun. She arrives back just as Harrold is starting to stir and shoots him dead just as Jack arrives.
This is where the main section of the story (set in 1970 and 1971) ends, and we zoom back out to the framing device, which is this: twenty years or so later, fellow journalist Helen Scofield seeks out Caroline, now a college student, to hand over the various interview transcripts that she used to write a magazine article on the case not long after it happened and while the lengthy murder trial process was still in progress. The article attracted some considerable publicity and gave Helen a career boost that went on to make her a wealthy author of true-crime books, but she has come to feel some guilt for how she portrayed Maureen/Mary in the article and thinks that it may have swayed the judge into giving her a more punitive sentence than he might otherwise have done.
Framing devices of this sort are tricky - too long and people get frustrated wanting to get through the wibbly-wobbly dissolve to the actual story, too short and it feels tacked-on and perfunctory. I can see why it was presented in this way; it allows the author to examine changing attitudes to domestic violence over a couple of decades, the original article playing up the angle of: maybe she asked for it, maybe it was just a bit of rough sex gone too far, maybe she and Jack cooked up the murder between them so they could continue their illicit relationship, etc. The device of having the main narrative be presented as a series of interview transcripts is slightly problematic as well: most of it is in Mary's voice and inevitably some of the more flowery descriptive passages read very much as something a novelist would write, but not necessarily something someone would say in an interview.
So the structural scaffolding is a bit too visible to the reader, but the story being told here is compelling and plausible, and doesn't fall into the trap of making its protagonist too saintly. It's one of the earliest novels of Anita Shreve's long career (published in 1991; the other three Shreves on this list are from 1997, 2002 and 2004) and maybe that explains the tendency to structural tricksiness. It must also be noted that the central plot resembles a sort of gender-swapped version of The Shipping News, and resembles even more closely the plot of the 1991 Julia Roberts film Sleeping With The Enemy, itself based on a 1987 novel of the same name. There is also a reference towards the end of the novel (in the section that reproduces the notorious magazine article) to some aspects of Mary's life resembling Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; that previous work is referenced much more explicitly in When She Woke.
Seasoned blog-watchers will know that the appearance of an Anita Shreve novel often marks a milestone of some sort; more on this in a later post.
No comments:
Post a Comment