Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990 TAG: 9003252166
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At the heart of Anita Shreve's first novel is a remembered late-night rape, blinding and murder in the farmhouse next door to protagonist Andrew's childhood home in upstate New York. The terrifying enigma of that scene, revealed gradually as the story progresses, throws out a compelling energy that makes "Eden Close" difficult to lay down despite several disappointing flaws.
Andrew, a New York advertising executive, has returned home for his mother's funeral. Like this plot setup, the externals of his life - well-tailored suits, a BMW, an angry ex-wife - are standard and predictable. The author herself seems impatient with these stereotypes; she wastes no time in laying before us the scene that has haunted Andrew for 17 years.
Late one hot August night, shortly before Andrew was to leave for college, neighbor Edith Close found someone in bed with her 14-year-old daughter, Eden. Within seconds, her beloved husband, Jim, was dead; beautiful Eden was blind. Andrew dreams of that night:
"It was the boy who woke first, seconds before his parents. He heard a woman cry out, and he thought, as he swam up through his sodden sleep, that it might be his mother. But when he was awake, he knew that the sound was outside, in the darkness past the screen . . . The second sound was a hoarse cry, nearly a shout, from a man, and with that there was immediately the frightened squeal of another female voice, that of a child still, like himself."
Now, sleeping in his parents' house alone for the first time, Andrew is obsessed, determined to decipher the truth about that night.
As he prepares the house for sale, Andrew watches Edith Close come and go, working split shift as a licensed practical nurse. He knows that her blind daughter, Eden, sits in the dark Close house, 70 feet away. His stereotypical high-school friend, T.J., coincidentally a real-estate agent, tells Andrew that Eden is a recluse, having spent time in a mental institution after the attack. Andrew watches the windows of Eden's house, catching glimpses of her gold hair and blue dress. And he remembers.
As the novel progresses, we learn that Eden was an abandoned baby, left on the Close doorstep by a 16-year-old girl. From the start Jim Close was enthralled by the child; Edith less so. Andrew and his family watched Eden grow up, saw her seek affection first as a tomboy and then as a sexually precocious teen-ager. Confused by her child-woman advances, Andrew was both relieved and angry when Eden attached herself to his best friend, Sean. After the assault and murder at the Close house, prime suspect Sean fled to New York City and was killed.
Piece by piece, with the help of Eden, Andrew replays the events of that summer to their inevitable conclusion. The story becomes a sort of film-editing process, as footage of Eden's and Andrew's past is viewed, discarded and spliced so that the whole is correct and right. Simultaneously, their present is delicately and sensuously conveyed as Andrew and Eden become lovers. Their scenes at the nearby pond are reminiscent of those in Margaret Atwood's fine novel, "Surfacing."
Anita Shreve tells a compelling, lyrical story ripe with allegorical significance. The non-linear, spiral structure of the novel is just right. "Eden Close" is not genre fiction. And one wishes that the author had trusted her ability to tell a compelling story without the trappings of genre fiction: the overworked device of returning to one's past via a parent's death; a cardboard character serving as a mouthpiece for revealing the protagonist's past; a main character fleeing a stereotypically bad marriage and sold-out lifestyle in a fast BMW.
by CNB