Rosellen Brown

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Family Secrets

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In the following review, Birkerts praises the premise of Before and After, but believes the characters lack depth and dimension and that Brown doesn't follow up on some of the novel's themes.
SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. “Family Secrets.” New Republic 207, no. 6 (2 November 1992): 40-2.

The title of Rosellen Brown's latest novel, Before and After, is misleading on a literal level: apart from a short impressionistic evocation of the Reiser family in happier days, the book is really focused upon after, on what transpires in the private and public lives of that family as the horrible facts of a killing come to life. But in the deeper sense, which is the sense toward which the narrative would steer us, the circumstances are in every way related to the before, to the assumptions about life once fostered by the Reisers and the members of their community.

Before, the chronological before, is given in a three-page prelude, a series of flickering images drawn from old home movies. “The little boy's smile is so wide, sun in his eyes, that he seems to be crying.” This would be Jacob, the son. And the little girl, “all dressed up, her fair hair shining,” is Judith, his younger sister. Then we see a blond woman and a bearded man: Carolyn and Ben, the parents. They “turn to each other at one point, just after the large shadow of a passing family darkens them like a cloud, and, as if they were clasping hands, grin at each other above the heads of their clowning children.”

The reader does not need to be gifted with second sight to know that all will not go well for this little group. The cheery ominousness belongs to television melodrama. Here is the bustling family getting ready for the day, or the mother making plans for the child's birthday party. … And sure enough, straightaway in the first chapter, Carolyn, a self-possessed and hard-working pediatrician in the New Hampshire town of Hyland, is called over to look at a body that has just been brought into the emergency ward. A teenage girl has been severely bludgeoned. Her skull has been crushed, “collapsed like a beer can, one of the younger doctors indelicately put it.” In a matter of hours Carolyn will discover not only that her Jacob may have been involved with the girl, Martha Taverner, but that he was very possibly her assailant.

The novel moves quickly through its opening crises. In short chapters that are parceled out between Carolyn and Ben (Judith's perspective is added later), we track the first jolts and aftershocks: the appearance that evening of Fran Conklin, a local police officer, who needs to ask some questions; the non-appearance—which soon becomes the disappearance—of Jacob. … Then the clincher. Ben searches the trunk of the boy's car and finds a bloodied jack. There is a moment of terrified recognition, but as soon as it passes he sets to work, destroying every last shred of evidence.

Brown hews to psychological verisimilitude, racing through the confusions of the first days and then decelerating. This, we say, is how it is with tragedies. First the haphazard tumble of news, the realignment of assumptions and expectations, then the interminable waiting. And indeed, it is only as the import of Jacob's disappearance starts to sink in that the novel discloses its true preoccupations. Before and After is only circumstantially about the crime and its punishment. The real focus of inquiry is on ethics and what might be called the metaphysics of family life. We butt up against the big questions: On what basis do we determine right and wrong? What are the bonds between individuals, family members, and citizens in a community? How are those bonds sustained, how are they ruptured? And, perhaps most pressingly, what do we ever know of other people—even those to whom we are bound by blood?

The mystery of Jacob's disappearance is eventually solved. He is picked up by police in Cambridge and later released to his parents on bail pending trial. Back on home ground, he moves about in a stunned silence, a revenant. The fact that he gets no chapters of his own intensifies our sense of his inner distance from the others. His isolation within the family more or less mirrors the status of the Reisers in the community. There are snubs, cutting remarks, and anonymous telephone calls. Carolyn loses so many of her patients that she decides to take a leave from her job. Then one night Judith gets a ride home from a friend and confronts a flaming cross in the yard: “After so much that was mundane, and so much innuendo, the muttering under the surface, this was extraordinary. It was huge and clear, God talking from the mountain: Thou shalt not kill.

Relations between the Reisers and their neighbors grow predictably more strained as the trial nears. What is less predictable, but emerges as the core tension of the novel, is the moral standoff between Carolyn and Ben. For in time Jacob breaks his silence and confesses to his family: he did kill Martha in a fit of blind rage, he is guilty. In Ben's mind the course is clear. He has already destroyed the evidence, now they must cook up a story for the trial. The book's epigraph, from Pascal, explains his moral justification: “When one does not love too much one does not love enough.”

Carolyn feels the implicit reproach of Ben's position. She, too, loves—but she loves differently, more reflectingly. She is unable to think only of Jacob. While Ben is a sculptor and househusband, Carolyn's vocation has exposed her to a larger world of suffering. She has seen parents in agony over their wounded children. She remembers Martha Taverner as a delicate child and has no trouble connecting with the grief the girl's parents must be feeling. Since there is no law protecting her from testifying, she decides that she will have to tell what she knows. Her truth will go up against Ben's. Carolyn refuses to accept the logic of their lawyer, Panos, who says,

Carolyn, screw what really happened! What's it going to take for you to get this? “The truth” in a courtroom is just a construction of effects. It's theater. … Either side can skew the way things appear, and how they appear is all that matters.

Pascal and Panos: the reasons of the heart versus the cynical manipulation of appearances. Carolyn and Ben must navigate between these two poles. To say much more, or to explain how the struggle is resolved, would be to strip the second half of the novel of much of its propulsion. Suffice it to say that all members of the Reiser family end up as pilgrims in the harsh land of after.

Before and After is a tightly paced novel. Its conflicts have been orchestrated to expose the tangled root system underlying all acts of moral choice. Yet in spite of this—because of this—the work fails. It is at once not enough and too much. Had Brown been content to play out the sensationalistic possibilities of her subject, there would be no problem. She would not have set herself up to be judged in these terms. But her decision to move the focus of inquiry inward, away from the more garish temptations, proves her undoing. Though the novel generates its own local heat—given the premise, it would be hard not to—it fails on follow-through. The reader is stimulated, even compelled, by the crisis and its consequences. But stimulation is not gratification. As soon as the covers are closed, the heat dissipates.

Not enough and too much. I mean that Brown has neither discovered nor created real characters. Carolyn, Ben, Jacob, and Judith are utterly without the singularity, the sap, that would let them possess the page. They all have their pedigrees, their pasts, and their basic identifying mannerisms, and all but Jacob are given the chance to express their emotions to the reader. Yet for all that, and despite the immense pressure they are seen to be under, there is not a spark of real life in any of them. The voices fail. They reach to a certain depth—the depth at which generic characters live—and go no further. Brown, like so many of her contemporaries, has put her trust in the voice continuum, that non-individuated drone-aquifer located just under the crust of the collective imagination. The author summons up a type and then lets idiom and convention take over.

Listen for a moment to Carolyn, who is driving with Ben to Cambridge to work on getting Jacob out of police custody:

She needed a cup of coffee to steady herself; they were, God knows, in no hurry. They drove until they began to recognize buildings, as if, in the neighborhood of the jail, they had been lost in the woods. Around Putnam Square, Ben found a parking space. The musical chairs of commerce kept replacing shops and restaurants with fresh alternatives—this year's fashions in cuisine and apparel achieved their fifteen minutes of fortune, if not exactly fame. Every time they came down to Cambridge they discovered that an old hair salon had become an antiques shop or a hardware store had yielded to a bagel bakery. They headed toward something new called Café Olé. Their favorite army-navy store (where Carolyn remembered finding a canteen and a set of flares once for Jacob's Boy Scout trip) had become a wondrously green flower shop, a dash of tropical green that looked as if it should exude its steamy sweetness right out into the frigid street.

To be sure, there is nothing really wrong with this prose. It hovers between exterior narration and interior monologue, situating us somewhere near the periphery of Carolyn's psychic envelope. The problem is that there is not a fresh phrase or a distinctive rhythmic turn anywhere. The prose simply cannot put us into contact with what we could believe is an actual person. The sentences glide on, drone on, saturated to the core with the kind of hip attitudinizing that may pass for consciousness in certain circles. I get no feeling of life. And if I blast at Brown for stuffing her novel with so many pages of this riffing, I must likewise go after a whole echelon of contemporary American fiction writers. For this kind of writing, the signature of creative halfheartedness, is epidemic.

My concern here is not with prose style alone, but also with the ways that style constrains or enhances the creation of character. Character may be destiny, but to get the fictional character positioned for a destiny requires a great deal of imaginative—and stylistic—penetration. Prose like the above will never kiss the dust awake. The reader greets at best an animated census figure, a Jane or John Q. Public with some attributes pasted on.

Which brings me to the “too much.” To put it most simply: Brown's subject has possibilities that far exceed what she has been able to realize. To embark on the big themes entails a certain artistic responsibility. But Brown is not willing to go the distance. We are led to raise all kinds of primary questions, but we are not given the materials we need to forge our answers.

The Reiser family is nearly torn asunder, but because we have not encountered its members at any depth, we are not allowed to feel the true fear and pity of their situation. Brown raises the issue of knowability, for instance—how well do we finally understand those who are closest to us?—but does not know where to take it. Here is Ben, reflecting:

You buy the toys, you close him in the yard where he's safe. And you think you know the whole set of characters in his head, the scary parts, and the sweet dreams. Only, one night he has a nightmare. It rips his sleep in two, and yours as well. You rush in, pull him from his crib as if it's on fire and comfort him against your shoulder—and he can't tell you a thing. … He's never had a trauma. Spontaneous combustion is what it is. The little microbes grow in the warmth of his head, the moist medium.

Which means what, finally? Is Ben acknowledging the existence of evil in the world, or is he just confessing his own stupefaction? It's not clear. And since this reflection bears so vitally on Jacob, on the fact that he bludgeoned his girlfriend to death with a tire jack—and kept bludgeoning long after she was dead—it is clearly central to the thematic weave of the work. We are prompted to ask not only the general questions about knowability, but also the more specific question: What would lead a boy from a nice family to explode in this way? It is not enough to say that other lives are sealed enigmas, but that is where Brown has left it.

The author does, at one point, attempt to expose a vein of gratuitous cruelty in Jacob's character. She has Judith relate to her mother an incident she once witnessed: Jacob was methodically stoning a dog that had been tied to a tree. “Carolyn was too stunned to pursue the details. Did he have another life? This couldn't be Jacob. He was never cruel!” Sorry, but this is not good enough. And yet this is where, philosophically and psychologically, we are stranded. To answer the question about Jacob, a question as urgent as Raskolnikov's, Brown would have to create a character—indeed, a family of characters—who could support the reader's sustained inquiry. She never does—the promise of the Pascal epigraph comes to naught. Brown has cracked open a set of issues vital to all of us, but she has failed to find the language, and through the language the lives, that would allow her to explore them at depth.

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