CAMPING OUT

by Eleanor Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 1986

An eloquently multitoned and tempo-ed, harshly potent philosophical novel, electric with both terror and light, by the author of Baldur's Gate (1970), other highly original novels, and prize-winning non-fiction. Here, two women--one unrooted, restless, a bit world-weary; the other a writer sourly abstracted from life--face death and evil in a Vermont woods. Bemused, doubtful, joking Dennie, wife of diplomat Carter stationed in Italy, and mother of nine-year-old Alan, is bullied into a camping trip by lesbian poet and novelist Marilyn, an off-and-on acquaintance who had, surprisingly, turned up at the funeral of Dennie's mother, Evie. Apparently, Marilyn is after some promising raw material (embedded in Dennie's stories of a childhood in a semiruined fortress on the Mediterranean) that she could hammer into the ultimate novel. According to the latest critical theory that Marilyn is bedazzled with, one should work for a ""verbal construct"" untainted by a soggy reality (Clark spears some critical trendies with evident relish). At the campsite by the chilly April waters of the pond, Dennie mulls family memories--of Grandfather, his campfire songs, the safety of his presence. But family, and their ""failures and confusions"" can be sloughed off, and a vision of Marilyn naked in the water, untypically laughing and indisputably free, calls Dermic to an erotic liberation. . . while a boat slices quietly into paradise. In the boat is the man the friends will call ""Fred""--alternately ingratiating and sinister, a master of the penny whistle on which he plays Mozart and Brahms, and a systematic killer. Convivial hours with Fred, the rape (or was it something worsen.) of Marilyn, the horrible murder of Marilyn's little dog, fuse into a gallop of death. Dennie, bound and bruised, feels as if her nose is ground into the earth of her mother's grave. Her mind floods with memories of family: grandparents, mother, twin brother, the young and golden Carter, the enduring extended family of the Italian fortress (old stones, old secrets)--all unique, entangled, the stuff of life. Trapped in isolated, empty violence, Dennie knows ""What anybody in the graveyard knows: that cruelty multiplies and societies die from loss of memory."" Alternating narratives--the glints of the knife and approaching death; the march of memory--interrupt and burst in on one another; but under Clark's philosophical canopy, the warning of the dangers inherent in disdaining human connections and soggy reality is strong and clear--and Dennie's guilty secret, abruptly revealed at the close, is finally of little consequence. Clark's settings and symbols (coils of spaghetti in a pristine lake; the spell-breaking manifestation of a deer) are immaculate. The deliberate jolts of narrative, back and forth from ""thrills"" to ""grandmothers,"" may be unsettling, but this haunting, searching novel is worth the twinge of vertigo.

Pub Date: April 30, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION