The artifices we humans construct around what we encounter are the devices we need to make sense of our world. Or, as you've seen before when I quote Joan Didion, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
Emily Ruskovich's debut novel, Idaho, is fiction that uses other marvelous constructs devised by humans, particularly music, to tell a tale of a family and its various members (plus a few others affected deeply by them or who affect them) and a double tragedy. Movements rise and fall, and are repeated, in set pieces and language that work the way music works.
Although I didn't realize this until late in the novel, it was one of those moments that make an entire artistic work fall into place. And to Ruskovich's credit, she did this in plain sight, then let the reader in on it just in time for the entire novel to fit together:
Meaning is like music; it catches and is carried. It returns. Refrains, phrases, the names of passing boats. Stuck in my head, it's stuck in my head. The way stories fasten themselves to words, words fasten themselves to vulnerable rhythms, impressionable tunes.
The story that this technique illuminates is that of the Mitchell family. Wade and Jenny have two young daughters, living on a mountain in North Idaho. One hot summer day, Jenny kills the youngest daughter and the oldest one disappears, running away. Jenny is sentenced to life. Wade, after a few months, goes back to the little private school that his oldest daughter attended, to resume his piano lessons from the young music teacher. Ann and Wade then marry. Wade fears he will have early dementia like his father, who froze to death in the snow one winter. He's right; he does.
The novel is composed of short chapters and set pieces that go back and forth in time, and between the characters. The emotions of an elderly couple reverberate in a scene between Wade and Ann years later. A request made by Ann to put one daughter's photograph with those of the other family members is an echo of a wall of photographs, drawings and momentos built by Jenny's prison cellmate. The certainty of Wade's father that a neighbor girl when he was little is really his own lost daughter has implications decades later. (It's also used in one of the most remarkable set pieces in the novel, that of a night when Wade's father is out walking, knows his mind is slipping, and he tries to reason out which house is his home.)
Knowing these things makes something shocking that Wade does to Ann early in the novel a little easier to understand. It doesn't excuse the action, nor does it mitigate why Ann forgives him and stays. (Ann decides it is because she didn't know what else to do, knowing it has to do with his dementia, and feeling that staying and enduring is how she can keep her vows. This may work for some readers, but it is a sorrowful thing to realize that this is how some people cope and excuse abuse by a loved one.)
A window into understanding was what I needed as a reader to continue. It was at times a difficult read, because the emotions there are as solid as hard ground under a bed of pine needles and dry grass on a mountainside. But those emotions are as true as the descriptions of the Idaho mountainside, a mountain like the one the author spent countless hours on growing up, a mountain like the one my grandparents took us to during firewood-gathering expeditions a few miles away. That was near my grandfather's birth place, a town where I once lived for a few years. Ruskovich knows the land and the people. She writes what is true about them and it fits for others, because that is how truth works when it is captured in art.
It is art that is at times more baroque and ornate than that which it is being used to describe. But when it works, it is a glorious symphonic work of words and phrases and feelings, with foreshadowings and echoes resounding and simple truths being expressed at their core. Truths like this:
We are more porous than we know.
It is being porous that allows us to love, to grieve, to hurt and to harm. It is being porous that lets feelings come in and out, sometimes like waves, sometimes like ripples, but sometimes still, like a reflecting pool. Because of the power of the writing, when emotions the result is as powerful as any orchestral swell:
Perhaps it is what their hearts have been wanting all along -- to be broken. In order to know that they are whole enough to break.
Many hearts here are broken. But in Idaho, the way the past informs the present and can give hints about the future gives people ways to endure and to carry on, even if there is sorrow involved, whether it's humming a tune or training dogs or a besotted young girl trying to present a homemade knife to an older boy.