Sometimes a book can be wonderful and painful, raw and polished, profound and simple, doom-laden and hopeful all at once. And when it is, it packs a punch. Robert Townsend has, I think, written such a book in this first novel of a projected trilogy, titled Spirit Falls.
There are many characters in this novel, people who seem alive but living behind some impenetrable veil that the reader can’t see clearly through, draw aside, or lift. For me, it wasn’t the people who were the most impressive characters; for me, the geography of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan adjacent the Wisconsin state line where the town of Spirit Falls is situated dominated the book throughout. It is place that dictates who these people are, what they do, what they have been, and what they can become. Townsend makes sure his readers know that whatever happens to his characters it is governed by the land, the climate, and Nature, all of which have remained unaffected by the insignificant deeds of man for millenia, and nothing they undertake will alter the relationship of man to this environment.
Richard “Ricky” Belisle is the son of a Serbian mother and a Southern American father, born into war, embedded among warriors, and at war with everything inside and outside his skin. He has one true friend, a French-Canadian girl, M.J. Charbonneau, so small that her defiant impact on him seems mythologically significant. They live in a hardscrabble town amongst people good and evil, native and foreign born, educated and profoundly resistant to learning. Beyond the tangible danger of their environment looms the danger of secrets and lies. Each – the land and the mysteries – could kill Ricky and M.J. And it nearly does.
Reading this novel, I did battle with myself. It was a battle of mixed feelings. At times I felt deeply connected to the two main characters, especially in vivid scenes like the Christmas pageant and when Ricky and M.J. race a a school friend on their sleds and come crashing into the schoolyard. At other times, I felt withdrawn from them like when Ricky’s Uncle Zoran encounters his mother, bringing news of the home village massacre in Yugoslavia. I think the times when I felt the strongest connection were those when Ricky and M.J. appeared together in scenes. When they were apart and their stories diverged into separate experiences, I felt the distance between me and them grow. Perhaps it is only when they are together on the page that a whole is realized and when they are apart, their characters are incomplete. Can Townsend be that subtle?
Technically speaking, I often felt frustrated with the point of view shifts from first, to omniscient, to limited omniscient that were disruptive and jarring. At one moment I was inside Ricky’s head; the next I was jolted into Duane Scullen’s; the next, the land seemed to overtake the narrative in order to speak of isolation, cold, and lurking death. Other times I felt Townsend tried extended metaphors that either needed more extension or curtailment entirely, as when Ricky compares M.J.’s way of sizing up people to her father’s. Her method involves
sorting, dropping them into slots, testing their fit, as if people were unstable elements of the Periodic Table. Her father was slower. There were fewer elements in his world. A man once slotted stayed there, as an element should. The miner did his job or didn’t. If you played baseball – game of a higher form of human kind –you were “developing” or “at your peak” or “over the hill.” These slots seemed enough for him.
Where did the Periodic Table go? How does categorizing by ability relate to categorizing by property? How can “slotting” and “fitting” – qualities that seem more related to mechanics -- be equated to the kind of sorting that is inherent to physical characteristics compelling an object to differ from another? For me, the attempted metaphor is awkward and contrived.
At other times, Townsend employs simile in a striking and effective way, as when he describes Adele Charbonneau.
She dressed as in Chicago, or, I suppose, Montreal: brown hair curled at the shoulder, white silk blouse, and jacket with skirt to mid-shin and black high heels. She seemed like a Lake Superior lighthouse – white, beautiful, austere – though it was a rare ship that passed by here to admire her.
Yet, in terms of characterization, I never believed Adele Charbonneau’s “reason” or motivation for her antipathy toward her daughter. Where does it originate? Townsend leads us to believe she suffers from a kind of feminine jealousy because of competing affections. Yet, at no time in the novel do we see any indication that Adele actually loves her husband, or feels even the remotest affection for him. Of all the “normal” characters – yes, she’s depressed, but she’s not crazy -- she demonstrates absolutely no fondness for another human being in the story: not daughter; not husband; not mother; not self. In a person whose sole emotional characteristic is loathing of others, self, and surroundings, jealousy seems inauthentic.
However, in handling crowd scenes like the school play night; when Ricky’s and M.J.’s families get together for a night of cards and story-telling; or with the young men out in the woods on the hunt, Townsend manages everyone on stage, endows each with a distinct voice, frees the action in a natural way, and reveals details that round out each character present, either by action, dialogue, or in the empty space between the lines. And he is equally adept at scenes requiring an understanding of the homey feminine world of domesticity as when Berta, Ricky’s mother, and Marina, the beautiful refugee, are making noodles in the Belisle kitchen; or when he must probe the tender places in the heart of inarticulate characters, such as Uncle Zoran the only silent Serb, or of the hermit Grote Van Ert; or when the action is masculine and primeval as when Ricky, Alek Stankiewicz, and Duane go hunting in Bogus Swamp with the dogs, Doc and Jeb.
But what I enjoyed most about this book was its power to evoke an atmosphere, unremittingly gloomy though it was. Foreboding, cold, doom, violence, danger from man, beast, and Nature, unpredictability, hopelessness, suffering, intractable Fate, and the instability of reliable power to control one’s destiny or environment are all arrayed against the survival of any character, and especially on the innocent. With so many powerful forces to be overcome, will the Hero and Heroine pull through?
Everything – absolutely everything – at stake turns on a single event which is, of course, the climax of the novel. All the elements come together in a near-nuclear collision: cold, weather, terrain, calamity, personality, doom, beasts, myth, violence, and death to test the innocents. The Periodic Table goes mad. And the greatest flaw in the novel is also the moment of its most powerful story telling. Townsend resorts to melodrama to pit the final confrontation between Ricky and his enemy, Duane Scullens. There is no nuance of emotions, no opportunity for a confrontation of wills between two people, no accommodation of one human being for another. There is, instead, a suicide; an attempted murder; an ambiguous slaughter of the not innocent either at the hands of man or Nature – we’re not sure; a literal life and death struggle in a driving storm; and an implied sexual assault that we know never takes place.
Whew!
Still, there is nothing unearned in the novel. One of the things Townsend does best is foreshadow everything that is to come. His skill at structuring a dramatic arc that is a perfect bell curve of story is masterful. I’ll talk more about that in the next installment of our discussion of Spirit Falls, and about his power of description, the themes, and symbolism employed. As well, I hope you will raise points that can be explored next time, too.
So, please tell me what you loved and disliked about the novel; recall your favorite scenes that stick in your mind, moments that moved you or that you thought were essentially human, and offer criticism of the literary merits and shortcomings of Spirit Falls in the comments below.