Stealing a Glance at a Complicated Suburban Life

An unjust war, tensions between immigrants and natives, bourgeois complacency—no, this isn’t a rundown from today’s New York Times. Trespass, veteran writer Valerie Martin’s latest novel, focuses on a microcosm of the tensions and misunderstandings currently playing out across the United States.

At its core, the novel is an elegant and provocative portrait of an American family’s fall from innocence. The Dales are a happily married scholar and artist; their son studies at nearby NYU, and they spend their days blissfully estranged from the real world, working on their projects in a comfortable suburban home. All of this changes when the son, Toby, becomes involved with Salome Drago, a Croatian refugee whose mysterious and violent past gradually overtakes the Dales’ peaceful existence. Chloe Dale’s distrust of Salome, coupled with her growing obsession with the foreign poacher who haunts the Dales’ property, gradually alienates her from her husband and son, exposing the limits and gaps in their complicated relationships.

Martin zeroes in on the tensions between the outsiders and the insiders—of a culture, of a community, of a family—and what it means when that status is in flux. Chloe, privileged, sheltered artist that she is, begins as the ultimate insider, a woman with an innate sense of her own security and of her entitlement to be cared for, respected, and loved. And it is through the protective gauze of this sense of entitlement and well-being that Chloe engages with the world. She rails against the Bush administration for its blind warmongering (Trespass ends as the Iraq war is beginning) and the Democrats for their cowardice. She is, in other words, the archetypal middle-class, coast-dwelling American liberal. And one of the disturbing suggestions Trespass makes is just how illusory and ultimately, at least in Chloe’s case, ignoble is this naive conviction in the comparative righteousness of one’s beliefs.

Chloe may be an unsympathetic character, but she is at least fully believable in her passion to defend her land and family against what she perceives to be trespasses both literal and metaphoric. Toby and his father are vaguer and more generic, and sometimes their actions and thoughts seem overly designed, too obviously intended to push the plot forward. Martin writes in the present tense, which gives her story an urgent quality in keeping with the novel’s momentum. But it makes more glaring Martin’s occasional missteps, like when Toby, channeling Dr. Phil, thinks, “What a language! Will I ever be able to understand it? Will our child speak it? Will I be an outsider in my own home?” And, ironically, the outsiders Martin’s novel seeks to humanize are the closest to outright caricature: the immigrant poacher whose very presence threatens Chloe; Branko Drago, the gentle, burly, much sinned-against patriarch; and Salome herself, whose complexities come to seem more like incongruities.

The main narrative is interspersed with fragments of another story, one of an anonymous woman facing impending war. It doesn’t take long to figure out the connection between the two threads. The horror of war is made vivid and immediate—Martin is especially good at evoking the aftereffects on ordinary people of a sudden plunge from normalcy into hell. Of course, with the horrific consequences of the all-too-real invasion of Iraq and the current administration’s tussle over immigration policies lurking on every page, Martin makes no apologies for her barely concealed agenda. What she aims for in Trespass is to reveal everyone’s complicity in the petty hatreds and prejudices that galvanize the machinery of war, and to refute the fallacy that any nation (or family, for that matter) can be immune from de-civilizing conflict.

Chloe Dale, for all her righteous liberal ideals and anti-war activism, eventually proves her strength when she realizes she has become as intolerant and literal-minded as the political regime she so despises.

Despite a sentimental cop-out of an ending and occasionally formulaic dialogue, Trespass is sharply written and unsettling in its exposure of the darker places in the national psyche that most Americans would rather not confront.