In one scene of Sheri Joseph’s latest novel, Lark follows
her older brother Caleb along a path in the Cloud Forest of Costa Rica. Caleb has recently returned from what Lark
thinks of as the Gone, abducted three
years ago by a pedophile ring and then, against all possible odds, having been reunited
with his family. Now, although he is
only a short distance ahead of her, the mists hang so heavy between them, that
sometimes he is a milky ghost and sometimes he disappears from view altogether.
This is a beautiful book.
In some ways it reminds me of certain Joyce Carol Oates stories that
study the effects of violent crime on family dynamics. In this case, Caleb’s return almost
immediately sunders his family, and his mother Marlene spends most of the novel
trying to bridge the emotional divide separating her from the son she no longer
knows. Caleb, indeed, barely knows
himself; he still thinks of himself as “Nicky,” the alter ego given him by the
man who rescued him from his first abductors and became his “father” rather
than returning him to his family.
Other reviews refer to this book as a “thriller,” which
seems an odd misnomer to me, although it does have some of the pleasing tropes
of traditional crime fiction, including a bit of good old-fashioned code
cracking – but it’s bound to discomfort readers who expect a more facile
treatment of difficult subject matter.
In particular is the loyalty and even love Caleb still feels for Jolly –
what a shudder that clown-like name provokes! – the man he still views as, and who
in many ways was, his savior. Joseph’s
nuanced writing will not let us dismiss this as Helsinki Syndrome and thereby
put it away in a convenient box and forget about it, but forces us to confront
our understanding of love, for as much as we don’t want to admit it, we have to
consider the disturbing idea that Jolly also loves Caleb.
This is why I think the designation thriller is
mistaken. A thriller offers a vicarious
experience of an extreme situation that, thankfully, most of us will never
face, whereas Joseph retrieves her characters from the Gone in order to have
them face what is true for all of us anyway, but which is too disturbing to
dwell on except in flashes of insight or while under the spell of a masterful author:
that just because a person is familiar does not make him any less a mystery,
just that the mystery itself becomes familiar; that we do not know even
ourselves; and that our world is bounded by ghosts and shadows.
We all live in the Cloud Forest.
