BOOK REVIEWS : Vices, Virtues Mix in a Small Town

Monkey Bay by Elaine Ford (Viking Press: $17.95; 244 pages). The accurate vision of rural New England life in Elaine Ford’s new novel, “Monkey Bay,” is enough to make a reader yearn for downtown Manhattan.

Though the book is filled with references to bottle-and-can redemption centers, videotapes, marijuana and other signs of contemporary life, there is an eerie and timeless quality to Ford’s Maine town of Stony Harbor, where it might as well be 1909 or 1879 as now.

Poor and backward, a crisp and indifferent, if not downright cruel place, the world of Ford’s novel is circumscribed and airless. In the small Texas town where I live, there is a saying, “You might as well call Eeds,” a reference to the local funeral home. I kept having the feeling reading Ford’s novel that her characters might as well call Eeds. Why they don’t and what they do instead forms the plot of her book.

Marilla Geary Pratt--tall, big-boned, withdrawn--is at the center of the book. She has loved Tucker Burchard since they were 13 and she saw him unwrapping a box of girl’s underpants in the local haberdashery: “Watching him do this made her feel so peculiar she thought she was going to topple over.”

Tucker and Marilla get together, secretly, while she is being courted by Lyle Pratt, who is older and denser than she but determined to have her. One day, Tucker leaves Maine and Marilla marries Lyle. Nineteen years later, Tucker returns to Stony Harbor and buys land on Monkey Bay, and their affair resumes. When Lyle finds out, Marilla leaves him and goes to live with Tucker in his perennially unfinished shack “without benefit of clergy.”

Marilla also leaves behind her 12-year-old daughter, Hannah, and Lyle manipulates the girl into refusing to see her mother. It is Marilla’s abandonment of Hannah that fires the engine of the novel.

Although the question of Marilla’s selfishness is discussed, she is viewed with sympathy. Marilla’s life with Lyle--impoverished, boring, sexually repulsive--seems justification enough for her leaving. Still, she wonders, and stays in a state of doubt.

She tells her friend Mittie: “My mother used to say, what’s done is done. She said that the day I married Lyle. But it isn’t true, really. I feel like I’m still marrying Lyle, still leaving Lyle, still longing for Tucker, still . . . Nothing’s ever done.”

“Until the grave,” Mittie chimes in.

One day, Hannah shows up at the redemption center where her mother works. Hannah is a sullen, aimless girl in her 20s who has left town and returned. The triangle of mother/father/lover is squared, but even this geometric shift isn’t enough to lighten the gloom and lethargy, even when Hannah moves in with Tucker and Marilla. There is plenty of brooding over the past and careful waiting for the future, and a new triangle is formed.

Tucker Burchard is so uninteresting himself that his place as sexual center of the novel needs to be justified by something in the women characters who love him. But they are drawn so obliquely and flatly that the reader is unable to feel much for them, except in the most logical way. That is, one is given evidence why the characters might act as they do, but it only makes sense in analysis, not in motion.

The virtues of the writing in “Monkey Bay” turn out to be its problems as well. Ford captures the smallness and boredom of the lives, the domination of human beings by climate and a static social interlock, but the novel also is captured by it. The brooding and hinting comes to no climax. Ford shifts from present tense to past and back again, but, as Marilla says, “Nothing’s ever done.”

As Ford has written them, the characters in “Monkey Bay” are numb, a word that recurs throughout the novel. One might think they’re numb from cold, which Ford makes palpable in a setting where summer is a dream between winters. But they are numb from the smallness of their expectations and dreams, and from the simplicity of their psychology.

Only the peripheral comic characters have desires we can easily understand: to retire to communities in Florida or North Carolina. (Ford’s characters refer to Southern climes interchangeably, as all tourists and outsiders are seen to be universally from New Jersey.) When Marilla’s friend Mittie muses, “I wonder what’s more important to me than Snickers bars,” her attachment seems as valid as any in the novel.

Though the author sets the wheels in motion for guilt, revenge, sacrifice and even redemption, the novel’s ending seems forced because the characters make their moves from an unestablished moral and psychological base.

With obvious affection for Maine, Ford took on the great American subject of small-town life. Though in the end Ford’s carefully wrought novel is the victim of its own atmosphere, the reader will remember the place and wish the characters better luck next time.