Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030043
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MARIAN COURTNEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
1969. The year in which Richard Nixon takes the oath as 37th president, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin walk on the moon and Chappaquiddick hits the news. Charles Long selects this era for his novel "Undefended Borders," a romance between David, a small-town American man, and Maggie, a Canadian woman.
Because the Ohio River was the dividing line between slave and free states, Maggie arrives in the river town of Eagle Bluff to research a book on the underground railroad. She meets David, who tells her that Eagle Bluff is the site where "Uncle Tom's Cabin" character Eliza carried her baby across the frozen river to freedom. Intrigued by the possibility of meeting people who might help with her research, Maggie decides to spend the summer.
David and Maggie are both in their early 20s but aside from that have little in common. David accepts things at face value; Maggie questions everything. David follows rules; Maggie breaks them. David lives passively; Maggie leaves ripples in her wake.
Despite their disparate outlooks, David and Maggie become friends and lovers. Their differences complement each other - and sometimes drive them crazy.
Together and separately they try to figure out where they fit in the world and how they should live their lives. Because the novel is set during Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, the author has ample opportunity for social commentary, and he takes advantage of it.
He pokes fun at both religion and politics through cynical Maggie: "Politics is about getting everybody else to see things your way, and throw them in jail if they don't. Religion is about getting everybody else to see things your way, and frying them in hell if they don't."
Lamenting society-assigned roles, David muses, "A sin is a sin ... But if you want to get along in this life you have to stick to those kinds of sins that folks expect you to commit ..."
Long also employs the sublimely ironic, as when revealing that David's father drowned during his baptism ceremony.
The author tells the story primarily in the third person, but occasionally shifts to first-person narration by David or via Maggie's letters to the Jamaican lawyer who runs the drop-in center in Toronto where she works. Long's vivid descriptions clearly draw the characters for us. For instance, when introducing Maggie, he writes, "The gravelly voice smoked and rumbled like a rusted muffler. It entered the gut instead of the ear ... This was a voice like dark melted chocolate, a voice that licked the pan and sucked the marrow out of bones."
Readers will keep turning the pages because they care about the characters. The author sets readers up to brace themselves for one ending, then surprises them with another. The innocent and the cynic join adulthood, their lives unfolding without the intense drama that young people often anticipate.
Marian Courtney lives in Charlottesville.
by CNB