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A Family in Crisis
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20030 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1992 |
2,031 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
BEFORE AND AFTER
Rosellen Brown
New York: Knopf, 1992
354 pp., $21.00
Rosellen Brown has a particular gift for imaging ordinary people shattered by catastrophe. In Tender Mercies (1978), she gave us the bright and lively Laura Courser, who struggles to make sense of her life after a boating accident leaves her a quadriplegic. In Civil Wars (1984), we encounter Teddy and Jessie Carll, social activists who are forced to confront their values and commitments when Teddy's sister and her husband are killed in an automobile accident, leaving the Carlls responsible for the two orphaned children. Now, in Before and After, Brown creates another family: Carolyn and Ben Reiser and their teenage children, Jacob and Judith, who face an unthinkable crisis when Jacob is accused of murdering his girlfriend.
Part of Brown's considerable talent for drawing us into these situations lies in her deft depiction of the ordinary context of her characters' lives. Laura Courser, Teddy and Jessie Carll, and the Reisers could be any of our neighbors, or even ourselves. The Reisers, after all, are intelligent, warmhearted, well-meaning people eager to impart strong moral values to their children. They live in the town of Hyland, New Hampshire, a town so small that "if you flushed your toilet three times in a row, everybody knew you were sick."
Carolyn and Ben deliberately transplanted themselves to rural New Hampshire to escape from the assaults and impersonality of city life. They chose Hyland precisely because it was kind of place where murders did not occur. "Shopkeepers still walked down the street to the bank with their money visible in its canvas bag and no one had ever been hit on the head for it," Brown tells us. The town, of course, is no paradise. "Gossip, here," Brown adds, "did the damage between antagonists that guns did in cities." When teenager Martha Taverner is killed, her skull crushed--"bashed, collapsed like a beer can"--most of the town's inhabitants know within hours that her boyfriend, Jacob Reiser, is missing and wanted.
Before and After, however, is neither Martha's story nor Jacob's. Although Brown based the novel on an actual case that she read about in local newspapers, she admitted that she was interested in the curious legal quirk that the case brought to her attention: Husbands and wives cannot be forced to testify against one another, but parents have no such rights in regard to
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