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Trespass, by Valerie Martin - A Review
by Kathleen Maher on July 05, 2007
Originally posted at: www.newcritics.com
tags: literary fiction, reviews,Leave a comment (3 so far)
Valerie Martin’s new novel, Trespass, achieves a rare balance between a powerful anti-war message and contemporary literature. Martin’s first novel since her Orange Prize-winning Property, Trespass portrays a privileged, intellectual family, Chloe and Brendan Dale and their cherished son, Toby, a junior at NYU. Chloe is frankly jealous of her son’s lovers, and especially so of Salome Drago, a “foreign girl;” a Croat from Louisiana; a Catholic; daughter to Branko, “The Oyster King.” Despite being a girl on scholarship, she further projects an aloof and severe manner.
Syncopated within these apparently familiar destinies is an italicized, first-person voice, almost whispery at first, which belongs to a decisive and calmly selfish mystery woman. Unnamed until the last third of the book, this outspoken but soft-spoken woman mirrors Chloe Dale. They’re both strong, intelligent mothers who remain attractive despite wielding their personal entitlement and beliefs against their children.
The Dale family joins Toby’s group of anti-war students in an “out of Iraq” rally. They agree that the Democrats elected to Congress are cowards. Interspersed with these scenes, fraught with tension as Toby and Salome’s relationship becomes definite, the mystery woman’s story gradually brings the atrocity of the Serbian/Croatian war so close to the Dales’ cozy lives in the Catskill Mountains that it factors, albeit indirectly, in the family’s dissolution.
While much of Trespass recalls light, palatable novels about academic families, the dark secrets and aftermath of a recent war enmesh the family in a remarkable and complex web. Ms. Martin’s deft touch sets the plot so carefully that the reader hardly notices as a subterranean penchant for violence insinuates everyone’s life. Trespass risks seeming ordinary when it very much is not.
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I love Property, but hadn’t heard of this new book. Thanks so much for posting this!
– dew (07/09 at 9-Jul 17:28 -05:00)
Dew, I’m just finishing “Property,” which I picked up after “Trespass,” and have hardly put down.
Ms. Martin’s facility with her character’s prejudices plays a subtler role in “Trespass”; of course, since it’s set sometime during this past winter.
Not having read “Property” first, though, I was quite struck by the way she not only made prejudice plain among her women characters--the men in “Trespass” tend to be exceptionally nonjudgmental--but allowed them to count their righteous distrust of “strangers” as part of their intelligence.
At first, I was intrigued by the way Martin almost emphasized these character flaws, while maintaining a wider and thus sympathetic view of the two mothers. A few times I wondered why--thinking that I had never known women like that. But as I read farther, I realized that, actually, I do know women who take pride in their suspicious discrimination of those different from them. The only reason I failed to recognize such narrow-mindedness in real life is that I don’t merely know such women but am very closely related to them.
If you’ve read “Property,” you won’t miss Martin’s subtler, contemporary story in “Trespass,” which is more complicated that it first appears. Valerie Martin deserves close, careful reading even as her fluid prose invites one to kick back and enjoy.
– Kathleen Maher (07/09 at 9-Jul 21:29 -05:00)
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It should be quite interesting because of the great author and interesting subject… But we’ll see, I want to read it anyway.
– Bel (07/05 at 5-Jul 14:28 -05:00)