Book Review : Clarifying Murky Secrets in a Tale of Love and Reality

Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 307 pages)

The time is 1974; the place, Northern California. A marriage--a mixed marriage--is breaking up.

Emma Fine, a blond, Jewish girl raised in West Cypress, La., is stuck in a declining relationship with Jesse Tree, a black artist who hails originally from Watts. On the surface, none of their troubles come from race. Jesse has been fooling around with Caroline (who happens to be Asian) for about 1 1/2 years, and for about a year Emma has known about it. On the other hand, for about a year, Emma has had a boyfriend of her own--Minor Daniels, a white-blond ne’er-do-well who’s done jail time, and who has no intention of leaving his own wife, and so on.

The squeamish reader may have some trouble with the first chapter here. There’s a sex scene between Emma and Jesse that goes on and on, pushing at the outer edges of the envelope, in terms of what is accepted, or acceptable, in novels. (Wherever you draw the line, there’s plenty for you here to draw the line at.)

Oddly Inappropriate

The sex, besides being off-putting, is oddly inappropriate, because the reason Emma’s and Jesse’s marriage is falling apart, allegedly, is because Emma can no longer respond physically to her gorgeous husband.

After the sex comes a hair-raising fight, and after that, Emma splits. She drives off to find her family once again and to explore her past. If she can come to terms with all that, maybe she’ll be able to effect a rapprochement with Jesse. Or so she thinks.

Emma’s past is murky beyond belief. She’s adopted, but no one has ever gotten around to formally telling her about it. Her father, Jake, is a nice Jewish person from New York. His past involves a mysterious girl named Helen, who had his baby, then keeled over and died, leaving him to take care of infant Emma.

Emma’s adoptive mother, Rosalie, has been raised in the rural south in grinding Gentile poverty--one of 11 children--deprived of everything, especially love.

Loneliness and Pessimism

In a flashback, Rosalie answers a newspaper ad and becomes Jake’s mail-order bride, which means that poor Jake becomes the loneliest Jewish person in West Cypress, La., and Emma grows up in a dour, sour, sad, bleak world, where her father is an outcast and her mother a Cassandra about everything.

“She always sees things her way,” Emma thinks about her mother. “It’s as if she looks at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, so that everything is smaller, not larger.”

The novel moves all over the place in time. We move from the ‘30s to the ‘70s and back again. We see the world from Rosalie’s point of view, from Jake’s, from Emma’s. Then, less convincingly, we take up the “world” again from Jesse’s vantage point. Although the author is really a master of Southern dialects, both black and white, the conversations between Jesse and his mentor, in which the mentor advises Jesse to settle down in a stable marriage for the sake of his art, just don’t ring true.

But as long as the story is Emma’s, it’s fine, so to speak. This is really a tale of rebellion and identity, and the facts--as unearthed by Emma--are not what they first seem. (Put another way, the “facts” as outlined in this review are not the whole truth.)

Getting to the Roots

This is a story of trying to get to the roots of things. Why is Jake such a sad, passive wimp? How can Rosalie put such a curse on life day after day? How can Emma ever love anyone, when she sincerely believes she’s never been loved by anyone herself?

That’s where the sex comes in. Emma’s idea of love is when she sees a cute guy across a crowded room, seduces him, records his name in purple ink and goes--either blithely or heartbrokenly--on to the next fellow. It’s all part of an urge to be different, especially from that rigid, unpleasing mother of hers.

But once again, “the edge of the envelope” comes into play: Emma committed the ultimate outrageous act in Southern terms by marrying a black man. But, in a fit secret-keeping, she’s never broken the news to her parents.

What is real about Emma, finally? As more secrets are revealed, Emma, and the reader, put the pieces together. The ending gives us one last set of secrets, and a pleasant surprise.