THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503140272
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
THE AGE OF CONSENT
GEOFFREY WOLFF
Alfred A. Knopf. 226 pp. $22.
IT IS INDEPENDENCE DAY at an upstate New York swimming hole. Beautiful, feisty Maisie Jenks, age 15, pauses on a 40-foot ledge above the falls. Suddenly she shucks her black one-piece and executes a swan dive into the rocky shallows below. Only a vortex marks her entry. A shocked moment, then pandemonium: Swimmers and picnickers rush in a confused tangle to rescue the girl whose coma and recovery will consume an agonizing year. Why did she do it? What drove her? Will her traumatized brain even remember?
In Geoffrey Wolff's sixth novel, The Age of Consent, the Adirondacks community of Blackberry Mountain seems the utopia of '60s dreams. Established by affluent former hippies fleeing urban sleaze, it's anchored by a charismatic woodworker/inventor named Doc Halliday. Jinx Jenks, once Doc's roommate at Columbia, is still his biggest fan. So Jinx, wife Ann and baby Maisie join Halliday at Blackberry Mountain. He designs their suitably quirky house - an outrageous tower that causes dissension even among their nonconformist neighbors.
But the whole-grain, in-touch, recycled, communal moon-watching, impromptu cross-country ski-trip exterior of Blackberry Mountain conceals ugliness too. Maisie Jenks' near-fatal dive is the slow-acting catalyst that sets the narrator, her patiently adoring but conventional brother Ted, to finally investigate his sister's terrible act; the why of the thing that he believes changed his world - and Maisie's - forever. His questions evolve into a 10-year quest before he stumbles onto the rotten but still-beating heart of the mystery.
Everyone at Blackberry Mountain reveres Halliday, the quizzical Svengali who allows no slacking off into the dullard ways of the conformist middle class. Nearly everyone has at some time been Doc's apprentice, partner or helper; he's a big hit with the kids at nearby Lake Discovery School. He's everywhere, orchestrating what Ted calls ``this cuteness, this pep, this zip and enterprise, this irreverence, this novelty and invention, this playfulness - it was all so exhausting, one bright idea coming right after another with the same relentless high spirits.'' Ted's dad remains mesmerized by Doc's cool genius. But Ann Jenks becomes embittered and disillusioned as her husband's schemes, which turned to gold in New York, pop and fizzle like damp firecrackers in the country. The tension in their marriage is an integral subplot. Their rambling, pseudo-philosophical arguments are a pocket-mirror reflection of the communal persona handcrafted by a real-life Pied Piper. And maybe Maisie's suicidal plunge didn't change anything, but merely called attention to what already was. Even so, only when outside forces shove the truth in their faces can the adults of Blackberry Mountain muster outrage about criminal behavior they blithely overlooked for years.
As the story progresses, action recedes and stretches of reflection, therapy sessions and past conversations dominate. But there's no lag, as characters' past lives, transgressions and regrets are revealed. The beginning of the end is signaled when the grown-up Ted comes back to teach high school history. Eventually he confronts Maisie, now living at a polite but firm distance in Manhattan. Soon he'll be the unwilling but stoic administrator of an eerily fitting justice.
Wolff's dead-on social commentary exposes a quintessentially ``perfect'' community as more of an extended dysfunctional family clinging to the last fading notes of heady '60s rhetoric. When parents decide that moral conviction is too ``provincial and white-bread'' to pass on; when they lack the courage to acknowledge and condemn evil; when maintaining a hip facade becomes a sort of religious substitute - what happens to their children? Wolff examines flawed adults shaped by turbulent, exhilarating times through the eyes of their battle-scarred children. They are the modern casualties of the old Days of Rage. MEMO: Lenore Hart, author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern Shore,
where she is at work on her second novel.
EXCERPT
``The facts were plain enough. Maisie had suffered a concussion. What
this really meant was Maisie had cracked open her head, and a
neurosurgeon down in Albany had trepanned her skull to relieve the
pressure that was about to kill her. What that really meant was a
mechanic with many college degrees had drilled into her brainpan to
create an exhaust valve from which fluid could leak. Also, his
15-year-old sister had broken her neck. What that really meant was she
was frozen in a body cast, paralyzed - not that she knew any of this.
But what had really happened? Why had she stepped out of her bathing
suit, putting herself on display to everyone who mattered to her? Why
had she aimed herself headfirst into a shallow pool? She wasn't saying,
and they couldn't or wouldn't, guess out loud. And the weird thing was,
Ted didn't even try to guess. He knew they should be turning questions
this way and that way, holding them to the light, but he didn't ask. The
why wasn't uppermost, then. Maybe he was afraid he'd discover why.''
- From Geoffrey Wolff's ``The Age of Consent'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Geoffrey Wolff
by CNB