The TrespasserEdra ZieskSouthern Methodist University Press |
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Reviewed by Diane Leach
The Trespasser, set in 1975, could not be more timely. The themes of ownership, trespass, and longing for a idealized past are equally resonant now, when unemployment, foreclosure, and an ensuing culture of squatting parallel the events in Ziesk’s haunting novel.
The novel opens with Sebastian Barry, a New York photographer traveling the states, seeking photographs capturing America’s Bicentennial. Armed with loads of camera equipment, an uneasy charm, and fifty dollars per willing subject, he winds his rental car up a steep Kentucky hillside gutted by mining, a mountain Ziesk likens to an animal carcass, "hollowed out, its solidity gone...its meat picked out so it looked, now, like a carcass with its rib cage bones sucked clean.”
The hill is picked clean by coal mining, and little work is to be found, a fact Barry learns when he reaches Hesketh Day’s land, where he finds Day's tenants, Cassius Clay Pomfret, his wife, Sylvie, and their toddler, Christopher. When Barry asks to photograph the Pomfrets “as they are,” the couple is initially bewildered and suspicious, much as one imagines Diane Arbus’s subjects might have felt. But a fifty dollar bill is too good to pass up. Things go awry when Hesketh Day materializes, demanding Barry, a trespasser on Day’s land, depart immediately. He refuses Barry’s explanations, imprecations, and efforts at friendliness, insisting the photographer intends to show the world how “sorry” his people are. Further, photographing an individual or his property is not giving but taking—taking something, Day says belongs to him.
Ziesk makes much of the notion of trespass and ownership in a place where the population is steadily bleeding away, the younger citizens leaving to seek work as the elder inhabitants die off, the land’s history dying with them. The book divides itself between those who leave and those who stubbornly stay, eking out whatever work is possible, adamant about staying in “the home place.” Throughout, the fragile mountain looms over the novel, rendered unstable from mining, partially collapsed, the result of a disastrous mining accident that lives in the memories of older citizens. Many were miners of the once rich land, now broken and abandoned. Character names like Narcissa, Mattie, Cassius, Sylvestrie, Naneen, all speak to the Appalachian South. Nobody else in this hilly hamlet is named Sebastian or has a French wife named Martine: names pin these characters in place like insects on a corkboard.
One of the novel's most interesting characters is the aforementioned Sylvie: Young, uneducated, pregnant with her second child, she is easily dismissed until she begins to speak, her words possessed of a native, practical intelligence transcending formal education, arguably surpassing it in some ways. While spending time in the more modern home of her sister Naneen, Sylvie notices both the constant noise—television, refrigerator, the ceaseless humming of electrical cords—and the silence of Naneen’s young boys, glued to the television, and her own son Christopher beside them. "She missed Christopher," we're told, because she is "used to having him nearby all the time."
Naneen shares no such feeling. She considers television a godsend, the pacifier that keeps her children not only off her, but from dirtying the house. Later the two women discuss Sylvie and her family's intended departure from the area, with Naneen complaining that now she'll "be the only one left… the only one of our family left in our home place."
"Well so what?" Sylvie says. "There'll be somebody else. People make a place go on, it doesn't matter who."
Arboreal beauty, quiet, and family roots will not, as Sylvie notes, feed her growing family. Only work will, and steady jobs are far indeed from this dying corner of Appalachia.
If Sylvie’s practicality is undeniable, so is Naneen’s sentimentality. As a native Detroiter who left home for the same reasons Sylvie plans to leave Appalachia—steady work, economic security—a lingering sense of guilt remains. I abandoned the home place; none of my family remain in Michigan. People may make a place go on, but none of mine are doing anything to prevent Detroit’s capsizing any more than these characters are preventing the emptied mountain's imminent collapse. We cannot. Always, the practical are forced to save ourselves, to the home place’s detriment.
Like Naneen and Heke, I lament what is lost, yet accede to Sylvie, who is right when she says it is people who make a place go on: arguably I am embedded in this “new” place as deeply as I was in Detroit.
As The Trespasser draws to a close, a heat wave is broken by a rainstorm of Katrina-like proportions. The storm is one of the book’s weaknesses, the building heat wave and massive rainfall an overused trope in an otherwise uniquely moving book. Cass has come home to fetch Sylvie, so they may try their luck elsewhere. As they flee downhill, the rains force them off the road, seeking shelter with Naneen, her husband, Tucker, and their children. An unexpected future opens up. But as Naneen sits at the kitchen table, sighing with relief at the quiet only she hears, Sylvie can’t help but laugh aloud. What Naneen has is not quiet. True quiet is the silence of the Day place, is night’s pure blackness. It is the lack of power lines, televisions, or radios, all those new hummings, evidence of some endless progression toward a new and now inevitable future.