 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Island JusticeFebruary 07, 2009 Island Justice. Watching me from behind the glass doors of a floor-to-ceiling cabinet in the place I was staying for a horse-sitting job. I opened the door and grabbed the paperback book off its shelf. I didn't recognize the author's name; Elizabeth Winthrop, says the back-cover bio, writes primarily short fiction and children's books, has received awards and accolades for her work, and is the daughter of the late Stewart Alsop (which would make her the niece of the late Joe Alsop, whose conservatism made me froth at the mouth 30 years ago but would seem tame and even rational today). The blurb at the top of the front cover alluded to "the reclusive but richly dramatic life of islanders" and added: "Both the romance and the reality of island living are here, with all the pleasure and suspense of a fast-moving, captivating, can't-put-it-down story." The blurber was Katharine Graham, the late publisher of the Washington Post -- and a conspicuous summer resident of Martha's Vineyard. The back-cover blurbs whistled the same tune, and an inside-the-front-cover blurb referred to an "unnamed New England island." OK, I was hooked. I took the book home. I read it. What the blurbs promise the novel pretty much delivers: a "highly readable" story about interesting people confronting believable problems in an intriguing place. What it doesn't offer is much insight into the workings of a year-round community in a place economically dominated by summer people and a summer economy. I read Island Justice (Morrow, 1998) with my mind in split-screen mode: the top-screen reader enjoyed the book, while the bottom-screen reviewer-critic tried to figure out why this feels like a summer person's book. The unnamed island isn't Martha's Vineyard. It's a lot smaller, smaller than Nantucket even. It feels more family-island size, like Naushon -- but in that case how does it support a school and how the hell do they get the ferry company to run so many boats to/from in the off-season?? The economic underpinnings of this unnamed island are pretty sketchy. How do year-rounders support themselves? A few are in the building trades, a few work odd jobs, a few work at the post office, and some of them teach -- all this is believable, but where are the waiters and and housecleaners and souvenir-shop cashiers, and what do they do in the winter? No one in Island Justice moves twice a year, or refers to having done it in the past. Housing, it seems, is not a problem. Maggie Hammond, the main viewpoint character, has been coming to the island since childhood, staying with her godmother, Nan. Nan dies shortly before the novel opens and leaves Maggie her big funky old Victorian house. Maggie, an appraiser and restorer of fine furniture, travels frequently. She doesn't want to be tied down to a house. She doesn't want to be tied down, period. It's pretty clear from the get-go that the island is going to save Maggie. That's what summer resorts do, after all: give summer people a chance to restore themselves and recharge after all the slings and arrows that Real Life sends their way. For year-rounders the island is Real Life. If we want to recharge, we have to go somewhere else: Florida, Nova Scotia, New York City . . . Note, however, that Maggie comes with a portable source of income. If she should decide to stay year-round, she won't have to worry about how to support herself. Shortly after Maggie arrives, a dead body washes up on her beach. The body belongs to John Burling, a notorious drunk who went missing with his boat in a bad storm a few days earlier. No one is surprised, and even his daughter, Anna Craven, is relieved. The reviewer-critic applauds Elizabeth Winthrop for not making Burling a murder victim and Island Justice a murder mystery: she realizes that there's enough (melo)drama in the island's everyday life to sustain a novel. Burling pretty much disappears off the radar at this point. The troubled Craven family -- Anna; her bullying husband, Al; and their 13-year-old daughter, Erin -- remains front and center. So does Sam Matera, with whom Maggie discovers the body. Sam's a avid naturalist as well as a schoolteacher, and PDQ he and Maggie become lovers. In the struggle for Maggie's soul, Sam speaks for the island. Tellingly, Sam has only been a year-rounder for six years. This is something else that Winthrop gets right: Sam's got the articulate zeal of someone who's been around long enough to realize that there's a "there" here, but not so long that he takes it for granted. He's also got a real job, and he's developed a relationship with the island's ecology that sustains him and stands on its own, even though he hasn't been around half long enough to be fully accepted by the longtime islanders. So the plots tangle and unfold, aided and abetted (of course) by sexual intrigues and the island grapevine, and complicated by the fact that the hands-down nastiest character is also the winter island's sheriff. On the whole it works. What it doesn't do is plumb much below the surface. For explanation the novelist tends to fall back on an island variation of identity politics: things happen the way they do and people are the way they are because "that's the way islands are." Someone goes off the deep end every February because that's the way it is. Trouble is, most of this stuff happens in other reasonably stable communities: small towns a thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, tight-knit urban neighborhoods, companies, nonprofit organizations . . . Insularity isn't unique to islands. Sam keeps saying that islanders have their own way of dealing with things, and as a longtime islander I think he's right, but when I finished Island Justice I still couldn't figure out what Sam, or Elizabeth Winthrop, thinks that way is, or how it works, or what they think of it. Do the resolutions of the various dilemmas laid out here add up to "justice"? I have my doubts. The unsavory sheriff has repeatedly climbed into bed with his teenage daughter, but "island justice" pretty much blows this off because "nothing happened." Oh yeah? At several points characters remark that "it's a man's island." The observation is never refuted or undermined; I wonder if the author believes it? I'm not sure I do. On Martha's Vineyard and in many another small community, men may be more vocal and visible and wield more political and economic power, but it's women who do the day in, day out work of maintaining community. That work is generally invisible to an outside observer who doesn't know what to look for, so I'm not surprised it isn't obvious here. But I'd like to think that on a real island Al Craven wouldn't have got off so easy.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||