Book Review : A Gothic Tale of Murder in Rural America

The Story of Annie D. by Susan Taylor Chehak (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 206 pages)

Set in Nebraska farm country, told in prose as functional and straightforward as a silo, “The Story of Annie D.” may represent a new subgenre--the American rural Gothic. Smack dab in the Corn Belt, shriveled Wizen River may not seem to have much in common with the verdant English moors generally favored by writers of such tales, but as Annie D.’s autobiography unfolds by restrained indirection and ominous innuendo, a familiar pattern emerges.

The child of a kindly, tenacious farmer and a discontented, ambitious mother who seized her first chance to escape her dreary life, Annie D. grew up crocheting doilies and conjugating Latin verbs, accomplishments her mother believed would guarantee a marriage more exciting than her own. Unfortunately, these city graces scared off the local boys, and Annie didn’t marry until the advanced age of 27, when Dr. Diettermann, a German refugee, came to her for English lessons, and shortly thereafter proposed by sketching a man and woman in connubial embrace.

Annie accepted, and Dr. D. stayed on to practice medicine in the neighborhood. Though theirs wasn’t exactly a love match, Annie was secure and content. She and the doctor lived in town, raised two sons, and had no regrets. The Latin lessons had done the trick, not only gaining Annie a husband but supplying her with the subheadings that decorate each chapter in the novel.

Rambling Reminiscences

For at least two-thirds of its modest length, “The Story of Annie D.” seems merely an aging woman’s rambling reminiscence about her girlhood, her satisfying life as Mrs. Diettermann, her ambivalent association with her dear friend Phoebe, and her impressions of other townspeople; none of the revelations particularly startling. Though there’s the usual quota of village scandal and tragedy, mostly involving Phoebe’s willful daughter Lacey, the days in Wizen River pass slowly, past and present all but indistinguishable from each other.

While we know from the beginning that there’s been a rape and murder in Wizen River’s Center Park, the subject is dropped soon after it’s mentioned, and the reader is encouraged to assume that it was committed by a drug-crazed transient who strayed far off course on his way to the coast. Though the chief of police is convinced that the victim must have known the killer since there was no outcry, the ensuing manhunt seems remarkably cursory.

Our narrator sadly reports a second and third similar murder, each characterized by a bald patch on the victim’s head where the killer has snipped away a lock of hair, but the focus of the book remains so firmly upon the minutiae of small-town life that the murders seem incidental--merely a gruesome reminder that you’re no longer safe even several hours by secondary road from Omaha, in a town with one cafe, a single movie, and bucolic Center Park; a place where everybody knows everyone else and a stranger would be as conspicuous as a giraffe.

Eventually, we learn that Annie’s son, Gunar, was killed in Vietnam, and still later, discover that her younger boy, Bo, had survived a grisly suicide attempt. The reader might have been wondering about Bo, who works as a handy man in Center Park and seems not quite right in a number of respects, but the failed suicide apparently explains all that, and thus tranquilized, we let ourselves be persuaded that the murders were only the stimulus for Annie’s memoirs of paradise lost.

When Phoebe’s profligate daughter, Lacey, returns to Wizen River with her illegitimate son after Phoebe’s mysterious fatal automobile accident, the leisurely pace abruptly quickens, and long-withheld clues tumble pell-mell over one another. Annie D. is so expert at keeping secrets that it would be grossly unfair to tip her hand before she’s ready to do so herself, but there’s nothing wrong in telling you that these days, Wizen River is as perilous as Los Angeles, though still less smoggy.