City Mice Arrive, Turmoil Follows

A COLD SPRING

A Novel

by Edra Ziesk

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

304 pp., $23.95

Edra Ziesk, whose unusual and lovely name heralds an eye for the lovely and the strange, certainly knows her Northeast weather. In the Vermont village of Amity the time is now, and the season is that cusp between winter and spring on which such snow-country villages can seem to teeter forever. “A white button of sun had begun to burn through, giving way to air slightly more transparent than it had been, though the tops of the mountains were still invisible. She could see Jody all the way up where the tree line began.”

Jody is a teenage boy, aware and sensitive but mute since infancy owing to early neglect and abuse at the hands of his shiftless, coked-out parents. “She” is Lenny, the lad’s youngish widowed grandmother, rescuer and caretaker. Their cozy home, encircled by hundreds of acres of state forest, shares a mountainside enclave with that of fiercely lonely James, a handsome albeit acne-ravaged high school teacher. Farthest uphill stands a third house, long unoccupied, ramshackle and riddled with wood lice.

In this cold spring a young couple, escapees from hope-battering New York City, arrive to seek refuge in the third house, the wife’s inheritance.

Billy is a brash loser hoping to set up a Mexican restaurant for the tourist trade; wife Nell, a cellist, has landed a job as music teacher at the high school. (Yes, reader, you have guessed where propinquity may lead.) Billy’s rich array of flaws includes a tendency to bolt; he “hates the country” and on the very first day dumps work on their chaotic homestead to make a run back to the Big Apple. At least Nell has her music to console her.

Not so James, who fumes as his mountain keep is invaded by noise. “Outside the cello music was stronger, the sound boosted outward by rocks rubbing up against the trunks of deciduous wood.... It was everywhere ... he leapt the porch and started up the road to shut the sound down.”

It is a classic narrative opening gambit: Strangers have come to town, and they will set events in motion just as swiftly and surely as a cue ball may hit the four to the two to the pocket. These strangers will change the local balance of relationships and themselves be changed. Important new characters move into range--among them Fernando, the homesick Mexican cook-to-be imported from Manhattan; Eli Root, widower and lifeline of the community (he owns the local heating-supply business); his rebellious son, Land; and Land’s pal Casey, a foulmouthed 15-year-old who plays a couple of cards shy of a full deck. There are beautifully mined insights into the adolescent’s angle on experience: Annabelle, Eli’s daughter, has a girlfriend whose lower lip is “pouty to show concern,” who wears “jeans and a t-shirt with a big star in sequins on the front and silver sandals.” Annabelle watches her girlfriend “walk away, the repetitive brightness of the sun striking off the heels of her sandals.”

By the start of the novel’s final third, Ziesk has woven accident and motive into a tangle of anxiety, fear and hope for her cast of characters. Authorial portents add to the reader’s flinching anticipation of some tragic, inevitable jaw of fate about to snap shut: “It came to Fernando now, as it had come to Billy, that he would not see his wife again.... What Eli thought afterwards was that everything ... began with the heat.... [Eli] could see two paths: at the end of each, Land would be a different kind of man.... Later Nell would think perhaps [James] had not seen her ... but of course he had.”

At 304 pages, “A Cold Spring” is not a long book. Certain paradoxes remain unresolved: Why, for example, does clear-eyed, virtuous Lenny, as the mother who bore and raised the revoltingly abusive torturer of her grandson, never give way to parental self-searching or remorse? Why did pretty, well-educated Nell give herself in marriage to the loutish, unprepossessing Billy? Perhaps “A Cold Spring” could have been allowed more growing space toward the end. As it stands, the drawn-out domestic actions of the early pages feel lopsided relative to the headlong convergence of events in the final chapters. And while some of the foreshadowing is fulfilled, other speculative lines are dropped. In the end, the novel climaxes in a single act of violence which, though fatal, seems to leave the surviving characters’ hearts and preoccupations not much altered. This may be the author’s intended message, but it leaves the reader groping for catharsis.