Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is one of those “labor of love” projects authors undertake that are ultimately more meaningful for them than interesting for their audience. there is nothing bad about the novel, not at all, but it unfolds in a well-intentioned but somewhat self-indulgent way that ends up reading more like a personal, therapeutic exercise than an entertaining novel.
quiet dell is based on a true crime case that haunted phillips; the story of a man in the 1930’s who courted wealthy widows through lonely hearts ads, promised them marriage and stability and kindness, and then killed them. phillips spent years writing this novel, and it is clear that she did her research, to give this one murdered family; a mother and three children, a memorial of sorts.
here is a link to some of the real-life bits:
http://www.wvgazette.com/mediafiles/d…
a lot of it is quite good. the first section is the strongest—where we meet the family soon to be slaughtered. which is problematic. we are introduced to them as humans with distinct personalities and dreams and talents, even though we know they are going to be brutally murdered. this is so we all feel the same outrage as phillips felt, the outrage that made her write this book in the first place. but when they are the most interesting and three-dimensional characters we are going to meet in the book, it feels doubly cruel when they are taken away.
i appreciate that she was so inspired and moved by the crime that she felt she had to give the eichers a voice and shine a light on a case that few may have heard about. but despite such fascinating source material, i found myself frequently bored. which makes me feel callous, but there it is. the idea of this charismatic predator who took advantage of desperate women reaching out for companionship in a time where these sorts of crimes were less common, and women trusted in human decency and the idea of finding their prince that is so heartbreakingly abused by this man—this idea should have been enough to carry the novel, but i felt that the story as written just wasn’t enough to hold my interest.
the romantic angle in this was the weakest element. i am not a fan of that YA staple of insta-love, but i can excuse it in novels that are intended for a younger audience whose hormones are all a-raging and are accustomed to instant-gratification and fast pacing in their books, where details are sometimes spared. grown humans know better, or should. and i just don’t buy that an adult woman in the nineteen thirties, in a male-dominated profession who has had to prove herself time and again, would throw herself at a married man in, like, an hour. and for the two of them to fall instantly and all-encompassingly in love, particularly since she was enmeshed in a criminal case where women were murdered when they were too trusting of strange men, it just doesn’t wash. i kept waiting for the situation to turn, to become dangerous, but no. this novel operates in a fantasy land where victimized women get justice and passionate, intelligent women are objects of considerate worship, orphans get rescued, dogs help solve crimes, and ghosts flit around observing the wreckage of their deaths until justice is done.
emily is a journalist, drawn to the case, and she goes through the novel, attracting men to her like flies to honey, including a homosexual man who instantly feels comfortable letting his guard down around her (and maybe more) and sharing the secret he kept from all others, while she’s also sexually attracting a bevy of heterosexual men and rescuing an orphan and righting wrongs wherever she goes, with more latitude than she seems to have earned. it reads like pure fantasy, and grates against what should be the meat of the story. i can appreciate the light in the darkness, but here the contrast is too great.
in fact, the story i felt the most empathy for was that of duty, the eicher’s dog. he came to them after his old family had been swept away in a tornado, and then he lost his new family to a murderer while he remained in the home with a sitter. and i started thinking about how a dog could even process this; the sudden inexplicable vanishing of two entire sets of loved ones, who never saw the bodies of any of them, and what effect that sort of confusion must have had on him. yeah, i am most emotionally invested in the dog. i was emotionally invested in the family, in the first third, but once they were murdered, and the long process of investigation and trial and sentencing set in, they were only a glimmer, despite some fanciful ghostings. this may have worked better for me with more splicing of eicher family story with the emily story, but i don’t know.
i wanted to love it, but it was just too tidy-sweet for me, too “spunky girl reporter rights wrongs.”
but i would welcome you people reading it and telling me where i went wrong, because this time, i think it might just be me.
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