Portrait of a Troubled Man in a Troubled Small Town
By NAN GOLDBERG
Tyler Caskey, the young minister in the tiny town of West Annett, Maine, is only slowly catching onto the fact that he’s overwhelmed and emotionally wasted.
Tyler’s wife, Lauren, had died of a brain tumor the year before the novel begins, leaving him with Katherine, a pre-schooler, and Jeannie, an infant. Even after parking Jeannie with his mother, Tyler is out of his depth, virtually annihilated by grief and guilt, the demands of his congregation, and the frightening ways Katherine has begun acting out: She rarely speaks and has so many screaming tantrums at school that the other children have begun to ostracize her. She was even heard to mutter, during Sunday School: “I hate God.”
But the truth is, Tyler might have come up against some powerful and bewildering forces even if his wife had not died. Ms. Strout’s novel, seemingly a portrait of a man beset by troubles struggling to keep his faith and equilibrium – a modern Job, if you will – is also a portrait of West Annett, a typical small town with myriad venial sins as well as charms. “People not familiar with towns like West Annett may not realize as they drive through the gully of trees leading to the sparseness of its Main Street that a social hierarchy exists there, exactly as it does in prisons, sixth grades, and Beacon Hill apartment buildings,” Strout writes. And the Reverend Mr. Caskey, a newcomer with a sophisticated young wife from a wealthy Massachusetts family – in other words, “different” – would have been given a hard time by some residents, regardless.
Charlie Austin, for instance, has disliked Tyler from day one. “The trouble with Tyler Caskey,” Charlie tells his wife Doris, “is that he wanted to be a big frog in a big puddle, but he could only be a big frog in a little puddle. … He needs a congregation of about three people who will sit there and adore him.”
Actually, most people like him a lot, especially the women. But that doesn’t stop them from criticizing and gossiping among themselves, as, after Lauren’s death, Tyler begins slowly to come apart. “By summer he seemed like a big tractor being driven by a teenage kid, slipping in and out of gear.” Tyler is thin and gaunt, his house is in chaos, and in the fall daughter Katherine starts school in outgrown and ragged clothing, “now decidedly ratty-looking.”
His only consolations had been his gentle conversations with Connie Hatch, his part-time housekeeper. But when she mysteriously disappears, the town residents first suspect, then decide unequivocally, that Tyler and Connie had been having an affair. “Tyler’s behavior was gone over with such enthusiasm that the fact he had told Alison Chase her apple crisp was delicious while he did, in fact, hate apples, took on the sheen of questionable character. … He was secretive, when you thought about it. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
There is nothing that Strout cannot write beautifully about, whether it is the brutal cold of Maine winters – “Understand – the inland reaches of northern New England, with its quick, hot summers, and long, dark winters, had bred for generations a way of life that had at its center the need to endure” – or the inchoate longings of a troubled child:
“For Katherine – if she shook her head enough times, it would be true: She had not said: ‘I hate God.’ Alongside the skinny fact she had said: ‘I hate God’ sat the bigger fact that she had not said it. And the only thing that mattered was that her father look at her right now as though he saw her, that he rub his big paw of a hand over her head, that the frown marks between his eyebrows disappear.”
There is so much that lingers with you after you finish this lovely book – too much to talk about here. A couple of weeks after reading it, though, there are two related scenes that stand out in my mind.
One is of Katherine at snack time in school, opening the lunchbox that her father had packed for her and pretending to look for the snack that Tyler did not know enough to provide. A picture relentlessly comes to mind of the helpless child, day after day humiliated by the missing snack but too shy to tell her father what she needs.
The other, which takes place much later, in the build-up toward the book’s moving climax, is a telephone conversation – one of numerous conversations among the gossiping women of West Annett. Katherine’s troubles and behavior in school are a major source of this gossip, which is, particularly in winter, just about their only diversion, so they take every rumor apart with energy and enthusiasm. On Alison Chase’s party line, Jane Watson asks Rhonda Skillings, the school’s guidance counselor, how her parent-teacher conference with the Reverend Caskey had gone, and adds parenthetically: “Martha said the child actually had some food in her lunch box the other day.”
The significance of that last, throwaway remark takes a second to penetrate, but then it does penetrate and you realize that Katherine’s painful daily ordeal at snack time has not gone unnoticed – that, in fact, the whole town, or its women, anyway – have known about it for a while. But no one has bothered to solve the child’s dilemma by gently explaining to her young, clueless father that he needs to add a snack to his daughter’s lunch box.
It is a small thing, yet it instantly captures the almost sadistic pettiness of small-town life, which can take gleeful pleasure in the struggles of a grief-stricken little girl. Of all the perverse behavior described so dispassionately by the author, this is the worst. It feels like evil, pure and simple.
But of course nothing is ever simple, in life or in Strout’s intricately layered novels. Ms. Strout’s debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, told volumes about this author’s talent, and now her second, far from disappointing those who expected great things, is as rich with atmosphere and food for thought as her first.
INTERESTING READING
(NOTE: I include these, not because I’ve read them, but because I glance through just about every book that’s published or about to be published, and these are the ones that look promising for one reason or another. The fact that they are included here does not signify that I have read each one from beginning to end – only that I was intrigued by them.)
FICTION:
Half Life by Shelley Jackson; HarperCollins, 440 pp., $24.95
THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT, by Heidi Julavits; Doubleday, 352 pp., $24.95
WHEN MADELINE WAS YOUNG, by Jane Hamilton; Doubleday, 272 pp., $22.95
THREE DAYS TO NEVER, by Tim Powers; William Morrow, 420 pp., $25.95
THANKSGIVING NIGHT, by Richard Bausch; HarperCollins, 404 pp., $24.95
A SPOT OF BOTHER by Mark Haddon; Doubleday, 372 pp., $24.95
NON-FICTION
WATER FROM THE WELL: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, by Anne Roiphe; William Morrow, 288 pp., $24.95
THE 101 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE WHO NEVER LIVED: How Characters of Fiction, Myth, Legends, TV, and Movies have Shaped our Society, Changed our Behavior, and Set the Course of History, by Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan & Jeremy Salter; Harper, 318 pp., $13.95 (paperback original)
LOVE AND LOUIS XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, by Antonia Fraser; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 544 pp., $35
FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY: The History of Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States, by Diane L. Beers; Ohio University Press, 294 pp., $34.95
INSTANT REPLAY: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer, by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap; Doubleday, 304 pp., $21.95
ENCHANTMENT: The Life of Audrey Hepburn, by Donald Spoto; Harmony Books, 369 pp., $25.95 (illustrated)
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Nan Goldberg has written about books and authors for the New York Observer, Salon.com, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic Monthly, Book magazine, the New York Post, the Newark Star-Ledger, and other publications.
