Trespass (Vintage Contemporaries) [Paperback]

Valerie Martin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2008 | Series: Vintage Contemporaries

Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan restaurant, and the battle lines are drawn. Toby Dale, son of the artist and ardent suitor of the refugee, is in no position to choose sides. Outside, the drumbeats for the impending invasion of Iraq drown out all argument, and those who object will soon be reduced to standing in the street. The story of two families—suspicious, territorial, naïve in their confidence that they are free of the past—Trespass unfolds with commanding force. It is a bracing, tender novel for the 21st century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This thought-provoking novel by Orange Prize–winning Martin (for Property) opens deceptively, as the quiet story of a mother slowly adjusting to her 21-year-old son becoming an adult. In 2002, Chloe Dane is a loving mother and wife, an artist engrossed in illustrating a new edition of Wuthering Heights and a protestor against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Her husband, Brendan, is a historian who doubts that his work has any value but is generally self-satisfied. When their only child, Toby, a junior at NYU, gets Salome Drago, his Croatian immigrant girlfriend, pregnant and hastily marries her, Chloe fears he was trapped by a calculating woman more interested in Toby's family's impressive house and property than in Toby. When Salome learns her mother, Jelena, whom she believed was killed by Serbs, is alive, she traces her to Trieste and abruptly departs to find her. Toby follows, and when the newlyweds decide to drop out of college and remain in Italy, Chloe sends Brendan to bring Toby home. A tragedy—one very convenient for the narrative—strikes while Brendan's in Italy, paving the way for a startlingly light resolution. Forgiveness doesn't come easy for the characters as they learn that nothing—not family, borders or survival—is inviolable. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics hail Trespass as a "stunning" work (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), with the potential to introduce Valerie Martin (best known for her 2001 novel Mary Reilly) to a wider audience. The novel combines the drama of family relationships with larger themes of xenophobia, war, and genocide; it also juxtaposes the comfort of the American middle class with the horrors suffered by victims of ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world. Although a couple of reviewers found the plot forced at times, most praised Martin for her achievement. Brilliant writing, deftly-drawn characters, and a refusal to provide easy answers make this thought-provoking work a pleasure to read.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (September 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400095514
• ISBN-13: 978-1400095513
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #357,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The outsiders are insiders now, staking their claim.", October 5, 2007

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Trespass: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars " 'But it's our forest.' ", September 18, 2007

By 

K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Trespass: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Exciting beginning, but disappointing ending, January 13, 2008

By 

Ruth J. Bernardo "so many books-so little time" (Newton, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Trespass: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.