Customer Reviews

Trespass

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

At first glance, the premise of the novel seems straightforward enough: twenty-one-year old Toby returns to his parent's home with a new girlfriend on his arm, Salome, a Croat who arrived in America with her immigrant father and brother, fleeing the war in the Balkans. Toby is enthralled with this exotic female, her brisk determination and eroticism, proud to offer her to his liberal blue-state parents, illustrator Chloe Dale and husband Brendan, on sabbatical while writing of the Crusades. Brendan is immediately drawn to Salome, her "small vulpine face, very wily, determined, elusive too". But Chloe senses trouble in the manner Salome presents herself, an odd mix of disdain and rudeness that is unwarranted under the circumstances. Sensing her easy victory, Salome whispers imagined insults in Toby's ear, salting the relationship between girlfriend and mother with distrust and competition.

Given Salome's youth, attractiveness and background, there is no way for Chloe to win this contest and both women know it. How can a mother's love compete with the horrors of Bosnia and an intuitive understanding on Salome's part that the world gives you nothing if you don't take it for yourself. Salome understands her unique opportunity, a survivor, Toby a willing coconspirator who readily asks his parents for financial aid so the couple can get an apartment together at the university. At Salome's urging, Toby has no trouble accepting Brendan's credit card, raised to expect such generosity from his parents, although they are not rich. Vicariously thrilled with his son's conquest, Brendan bonds with Toby, man to man; Chloe retreats to her studio and her work on the images for Bronte's Wuthering Heights, worrying about the encroachment of a poacher on their land, an immigrant of indeterminate origin.

A personal diary is interspersed through the story, a harrowing description of a woman trapped in Bosnia, at the mercy of her indifferent Serb captors, staying alive by her wits and determination. It is this event, the enormity of such a journey that overshadows Chloe's personal dilemma, suddenly so insignificant on a world stage. This as yet unidentified woman will indeed play a pivotal role in the unfolding story, one that shifts the focus from Toby's family-of-origin, leaving Chloe to sort through confused emotions in the wake of a thoughtless son, his pregnant bride-to-be and a husband who fails to protect his wife's best interests. Is this story really about the changing face of America, a bold challenge for liberals to step up and act out their espoused beliefs? I cannot decide. If so, why a twist at the end that makes resolution impossible, for the characters or the reader?

In spite of pages of hand-written notes to resolve my reaction to the novel, I remain ambivalent and unsettled. Is Martin's emotional palette as rich as first appears, or have the failings of the liberal Dale's become a convenient scapegoat? Salome and her family's lives are dramatic, traumatic and blatantly irresistible to the Dale males. Only Chloe fails, incapable of assimilation into the readjusted family paradigm. Like a detached retina, my reaction never reconciles with the author's vision. Everyone survives intact, better off, only one suffering the ultimate trespass. Luan Gaines/2007.

Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Samuel P. Huntington all theorized about the ebb, flow, and clashes of civilizations and cultures. Valerie Martin, it can be said, follows in their footsteps in TRESPASS. But rather than produce a long, dry macroscopic history; she writes a micro-drama in the form of a finely-tuned, exquisitely-layered novel about the Dale family.

Brendan and Chloe Dale live an hour and a half from NYC, in the Catskill Mountains. They own ten acres that include a posted woods where an immigrant hunter persistently trespasses and tries to shoot deer, aggravating and unsettling Chloe. Chloe illustrates books, and her current commission, which she is painstakingly researching, is a special edition of WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Brendan is professor writing about Frederick of Hohenstaufen, a thirteenth-century emperor rather neglected by history. Their son, Toby, is an honors student at New York University who meets and falls for Salome Drago, a volatile, abrasive young woman of Catholic Croatian descent who is also attending NYU. Salome was a child when she and her father and brothers fled their Balkans homeland during the ethnic cleansing. Right from their first meeting, Salome and Chloe squabble and skirmish.

In TRESPASS, Martin sets scene after scene to illustrate the shifting sands of culture, class, and civilization, including unflinching sections told by someone who remained in the festering, furious Balkans after Salome and most of her family escaped. This italic narrator relates the horrors witnessed and personally suffered as Yugoslavia violently dissolved into constituent, primarily ethnic states.

The affluent, agnostic Eastern Dales who join their (mainly) liberal friends in marches against war -- in the novel's 2003-2004 time frame, the Iraq War is about to be declared -- will either, TRESPASS cautions, acquiesce gracefully (even eagerly?) to the inevitability of changing demographics, or not...but resistance won't alter that inevitability. Toby charges ahead, "I want to know Salome. I want to know everything about her. That's my mission." Brendan prefers to go with the flow and avoid confrontations; when the would-be deer poacher invades again, he'd rather just not venture into the woods. Chloe isn't made that way; she calls her son "an idiot" for letting Salome into their lives, and she would argue against the hunter, " 'But it's our forest.' "

Whether one agrees or not with the premise that America is irremediably passing to a new set of custodians, this highly intelligent, complex novel should not be missed. TRESPASS is a veritable treasure trove of memorable imagery and symbolism. Included are astute and evolving historical analyses by Brendan. Chloe, meanwhile, hypothesizes on how a meeting between Emily Bronte and Henry David Thoreau might have gone -- "Could two more disparate sensibilities ever have occupied the planet at the same time?" -- and muses about Bronte's Heathcliff as "the vengeful orphan, the ungrateful outsider, the coming retribution of the great underclass."

But this is first and foremost a story to be savored on the human level. TRESPASS avoids obvious options. The Dragos are not Muslim, although Chloe at first thinks they are. The hunter (more augury than person, especially early on) isn't quite the bogeyman Chloe imagines, but his modest part in TRESPASS is pivotal. And Salome isn't the ominous figure one might have expected from reading the book's back cover which labels her "a toxic mix of the old world and the new." The choices each character faces and the sometimes predictable, sometimes astounding decisions they make represent this great novel's succulent marrow. Savor it, digest it.

Very highly recommended.

Reading "Trespass" was like reading two books; it began with tension created when Toby, Chloe and her husband, Brendan's only son, brings his new girlfriend, Salome, home with him from college. The author increases this tension with Salome's indifferent and somewhat hostile acts toward the parents, especially Chloe, who realizes that the two are sleeping together and learns later into the book that Salome is pregnant and Toby wants to marry her. She protests that they are too young - Toby is only 21! There is also a poacher shooting rabbits near their home despite her pleas to stop.

So far, so good. Then the author throws in a monkey wrench - by having Chloe die of a stroke. Blink!! The whole storyline shifts to Croatia, where Salome suddenly flys to find her mother who she thinks might be still alive after the Serbian/Croatian war. Toby follows and then Brendan and this new situation becomes the focus of the book until its ending. I found the book totally unsatisfying. It didn't follow through with its premise - that of trespass, by probable and threatening persons and situations.

The principle plot points of this book set the stage for all forms of intrusion and encroachment. A new character in a family's life threatens to change everything, a strange man hunting on private property lays a foundation of menace, and the characters collectively react by trying to protect what belongs to them, what feels like the established order of their lives. The tension and vague sense of danger that pervades the first two-thirds of the book had me turning pages, eager to get to the next development.

The removal of a central character in this novel ruins everything. The tension drains from the story like air from a punctured balloon. Thereafter, the plot drifts, story lines are left to wither, and the entire exercise feels a bit futile. The book is nicely written, but I can't help but think the energy and mood of the first two-thirds could have carried through to some pivotal confrontation and then, perhaps, to a discernible point.

Valerie Martin's novel, Trespass, is both interesting and provocative. It offers no easy solutions and makes no definitive judgments about the modern world, but it does give a realistic view of individuals in our increasingly diverse society. Moreover, the novel objectively portrays the difficulty of idealism when it encroaches on personal choices and values.

What Valerie Martin's characters do isn't as interesting as who they are. Watching her create the intricate nuances of even the minor players in this excellent morality play is like observing an origami master at work.

As in Property (another Martin work I highly recommend), each of the characters is someone we both like and dislike, respect and abhor. Chloe Dale, the protagonist, leads the life many of us would love to have. She's talented, successful, relaxed, and fulfilled. She's also overly protective of her son, Toby, and has a streak of bigot in her that makes the reader sit up and take notice. It's the mix of sweet and sour that makes Chloe a fully-realized human being--and one fascinating to read about.

You'll have mixed feelings about every one of the characters: husband Brendan is unambitious but level-headed, son Toby a romantic naif blinded by his hormones. His wife Salome, a Croatian refugee, is mysteriously seductive and parasitic. Jelena, the unidentified narrator of great swatches of the book, is revealed like a slowly peeling onion.

There are enough plot twists and action to carry the story along, but the real pleasure in reading Trespass is in discovering the characters as Martin's fruitful mind conceived them.

"Trespass" by Valerie Martin is a masterful work of literary, moral, and intellectual fiction, but it is also a compelling work of contemporary storytelling. I was hooked into the plot from the very first page--immediately submerged in a dark, moody world filled with threatening overtones. This book has taut suspense, but also great thematic power.

As the title suggests, this is a novel about trespass--about the myriad boundaries in our lives and the people who violate them. But more importantly, it is about how individuals choose to react to those violations. The main characters in this novel endure encroachment, transgression, intrusion, and invasion--all nuances of the title word. These transgressions give weight to the storyline. But it is ultimately how each character responds to these transgressions that captures the reader's intellectual interest. Some characters make choices that lead toward health and a life. Others make choices that propel them on negative downward spirals. Martin shows us how her characters choose to live with uncomfortable truths and unchangeable reality.

The story begins in late 2002, that tumultuous period when the United States was getting day-by-day ever closer to war with Iraq. We meet the Dale family living a comfortable, bucolic upper-middle class life in rural upstate New York. The father, Brendan, is a professor of medieval history researching and writing an academic biography of a 13th-century king that played a significant role in the Crusades. Chloe, the mother, is a book illustrator researching and creating engravings for a new edition of "Wuthering Heights." Their son, Toby, is a college student studying at NYU. Everyone in the family is liberal and politically active.

Two separate forces trespass into this world.

First, Toby brings home Salome Drago, a strange exotic Croatian-American NYU student whom he loves beyond reason. To Toby, Salome is bright, passionate, and self-confident; however, Toby's parents find her moody, abrasive, and confrontational. Brendan keeps these thoughts to himself, but Chloe confronts her son privately with her distrust and dislike toward this new woman in his life. Chloe has nothing but antipathy toward this family encroacher.

Second, there's an actual intruder loose in Chloe's backyard--a poacher has left tell-tale signs that he is hunting within their private 10-acre woods. Chloe is obsessed with finding out who this man is, and getting him off her property. She feels threatened and violated.

Woven erratically throughout the novel is a parallel story about a woman living in Croatia some dozen years earlier. The woman in this story is both a transgressor and a victim. Her story is a passionate tale of a woman seeking her identity at all costs. But war intervenes, and this woman falls victim to some of its worst atrocities. Circumstances force her to make a series of fateful decisions, all in the face of untold hardship and suffering. The reader is left to examine these decisions and contemplate their overall effect on the lives of those most dear to her. Were these healthy decisions? Were they right? Has this woman created the best life she could for herself despite all the horrors she endured and the pain she caused others?

As the main story unfolds, readers ask similar questions about each member of the Dale and Drago families. These characters also experience a series of life-changing events, and the reader ponders the motives behind each character's fateful decisions. At the end, the author wants us to try to gaze into the future and imagine how we might expect the lives of these characters to unfold. How will these characters fare in a future where they must constantly deal with issues of trespass?

Brendan, the historian, is in this novel for a purpose. As the novel draws to a close, Brendan is watching TV alone in a Trieste restaurant and realizes that America has finally initiated the long-feared war with Iraq. He and the other patrons of the restaurant watch, all with little amazement, as the horrific "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign of Baghdad is played out on live television. Brendan thinks: "The thing to do is to take the long view of it; this is his profession, after all. What is really happening on that screen is history-in-the-making, and not just recent history, but, should the planet survive, ancient history. Our fate is ever to rush into the past as if we thought it was the future. But we are in the history van along with all the other curious, faded civilizations that failed for reasons now obvious."

This is a novel in the best tradition of moral fiction. Enjoy the suspense, but linger over the messages. Frankly, I don't see the happy ending that some other reviewers complain about. This book has an ending perfectly consistent with the whole. It is not a book that I will probably reread in a few years, and these are characters that I will probably soon forget. But I recommend this work highly because of its deep thematic impact and the compelling suspense I enjoyed while reading it.

If after finishing this work, you desire to see a truly outstanding independent film on an eerily similar subject, I recommend "The Secret Life of Words." This is a truly amazing film--positively unforgettable in every way!

Others have said it better than I could but wanted to get my 5-star rating counted to support this talented author. A highly readable masterpiece!

Valerie Martin is a wonderful writer, and "Trespass" is a book that is well worth the read, if only to slide through her expert language use. I am now trying to choose another of her works; that's how much I enjoyed her writing.

This book is an interesting tome, with paragraphs that could make their own independent books. The beginning was exasperatingly (and seemingly deliberately) obtuse; I re-read it over once I got to know the characters / situations better -- then I understood it. How could one have possibly understood the relationship dynamics when the onslaught of names (Chloe, Salome, Toby, Brendan), presented within the first several, very charged paragraphs, could not even be followed ?

Another criticism is that she has broached subjects that are deep, with few frameworks to "hang them on." What I mean by this is that Martin, perhaps for the sake of rounding out her characters, has introduced dense paragraphs about the studies / work of Chloe, the story's mother figure, who is illustrating a book on Wuthering Heights. "Heights" is of little interest to me, and at times -- although sometimes I appreciated the education -- I felt that Martin's involved descriptions of things outside the plot went overboard, almost as though she were trying to prove to readers that she is, indeed, someone who has background education.

To be fair, I must say that Martin's expression, and great language use, made these dense paragraphs more tolerable, and that indeed, she has proven to me that she has a political / social education, that in other bestselling novels, is painfully missing.

After reading a while, I was engrossed, and I started liking the clear picture that Martin was presenting with regard to the USA in the middle of the "War on Terror" as seen from the standpoint of an upper middle class, liberal academic. The side-stories (Brendan's experiences as a publishing academic and the snobbism of the hallowed halls; Branko's world; the war history of Salome's mother; Chloe's living inside her own head, etc.) are educational and well presented.

On to another Valerie Martin book.

I never give 5 stars, but I think this book is worth it. Great characters, a variety of locales, literary references that were on the verge of overdrawn but good in the end, and excellent writing. This book has it all.