I am feeling neither kindly nor eccentric today. Yesterday, in great confusion, I finished Sue Miller's skilled, flawed. breath-taking novel "Lost in the Forest." I opened it up, fell right into its furious rhythms, and didn't emerge until a day later. So much of it is wonderful: how it nails a particularly middle-class culture in the Napa Valley, how it shows how two adults can think they're grown-up parents but be completly oblivious to the pain of their teenage daughter, how awful that daughter can be after her stepfather is killed in a car accident...
and yes, there are spoilers galore in this post.
The girl, the grief-stricken, awkward, 15-year-old girl turns to petty thievery from her mother's bookstore, which leads, unwittingly, to sexual encounters with her mother's best friend's husband, a man three times her age, a broken-bodied stuntman turned woodworker. The girl likes the attention, likes the sex (which is focused on her, not on him), and yet it's a kind of trap, a fairy tale trap, from which she is rescued by her father, who finally grows the hell up, confronts her, but never tells her mother, or the wife, or anyone else.
And no, the cops are not called. And no, the girl isn't ruined for life. So it isn't a Lifetime movie. And..I'm not asking it to be Lifetime movie. But the truth remains: the guy who "awakened" this 15-year-old girl? He's a sexual predator. So while the girl is rescued by her father, and, to some degree, her own actions, the fact that both the girl and the father choose to keep this a "private matter" means...they are actually exposing another girl, perhaps not so savvy, not so lucky to have a good father, to the wiles of this guy. In a fairy tale, you vanquish the monster. In this contemporary novel, he gets to come to dinner and make small talk.
It bothers me. I really liked the style of this novel, the pace, the pulse, the empathy, the beautiful details about the griefstricken. While not all characters are fully drawn, each character is complex. But I think we're supposed to approve of this private solution, and not see the sexually awakened daughter and her father as...well, two more co-conspirators in the sexual predator's racket.
Maybe we're not supposd to approve of it, and that's the point of the book...that as likable as these characters are, they're also people who don't want to rock the boat. And that is the mark, for me, of a good book, where you're not even quite sure if there is a single "message."
But I'd sure like to see that guy in jail.
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