CROSS BODY LEAD

A psychological novel focuses on issues of race, personal responsibility, and privilege at a California liberal arts college.

College student Evelyn Davis is dealing with a stalker. Trouble is, no seems to know what to do about him. Eddie Pike, an Afghanistan War veteran, is an older White student. He maintains he means Evelyn no harm, but it’s obvious his personal problems exceed the services that the college’s counseling clinic offers. A sophisticated African American woman, Evelyn knows how to navigate both the Black and White worlds, “having been brought up in a well-to-do white neighborhood.” Professor Billie Ochoa teaches a class Eddie and Evelyn share. Billie is enamored of her Cuban heritage and Fidel Castro’s island paradise. As a conscientious educator, she tutors Eddie alone so he can continue with the class while Evelyn stays safe. But the unwanted intrusions mount, from Eddie’s following Evelyn to his sneaking into her apartment. Campus police tiptoe around the problem because they say they can’t prove Eddie committed a crime. Evelyn is leery of the authorities, and soon the issues of race and administrative action boil over. Billie is exasperated, venting to a college official: “A young African-American woman who’s being stalked? Doesn’t that distress you? Just a bit? That it’s the white men you’re always protecting?” The administration reaches out to Eddie, but when a restraining order is issued, word gets out that he is a stalker, and he becomes the object of student protests. In this engaging tale, Axelroth is fair to all the characters and allows Evelyn and others to see both sides of the complicated race issue. At times, Evelyn feels discomfort at being “a stand-in for whatever Black people thought—about police shooting unarmed Black men, and looting in Black neighborhoods, and isn’t affirmative action just reverse discrimination?” Personal responsibility becomes an issue when Billie lies and tells the authorities Eddie threatened Evelyn and when an administration member attempts to use the tumultuous campus situation to benefit her own agenda. This is set against secondary themes of the Cuban revolution, communism, and how sometimes the ends justify the means, which all get a rousing pro and con analysis in an academic hothouse of impassioned young thinkers.

Both sides of the race issue get a fair hearing in this well-executed tale.