War Weary

TRESPASS

By Valerie Martin

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 288 pp. $25

The tiresome thing about speaking truth to power is that you can speak until you're blue in the face, but power isn't listening. Power is busy in the boardroom or playing golf or getting up to no good in some hotel room where it shouldn't be. The last thing on this Earth that power cares about is truth.

The truth conveyed in Valerie Martin's novel "Trespass" is by now all too familiar: the horridness of pointless war, the terrible trauma it inflicts upon its victims, its awful persistence, so that in spite of all our anti-violence rhetoric, it breaks out periodically like cholera or the common cold. But "Trespass" is so remarkable in its choice of character, plot and place, so absolutely surprising in its outcome that it's wonderful not for its good intentions but for its extraordinary craft.

The plot begins in classic, even platitudinous American-novel normalcy. Chloe Dale, an upper-middle-class book illustrator who lives outside Manhattan with her seemingly bland husband, Brendan (currently on academic sabbatical writing a historical study that looks never to be published or even finished), has come into the city to take her undergraduate son, Toby, and his new girlfriend, Salome, to lunch in a nice restaurant. Doing something nice for the kids. Except that Salome, a Croatian refugee, sports a gigantic head of snarly hair, puts her bread on Chloe's plate, and when asked politely how she likes New York, answers, "Not much." But "Chloe is charming, everyone says so," and she "feels a stab of pity for the young woman, so clearly out of her element."

Chloe, though, is utterly clueless about the facts of the situation. Salome immediately recognizes her as her natural enemy, and the minute she and Toby leave lunch she begins to talk trash about his mother. When he defends her, Salome growls, "So you take her side." Of course, Toby can't really do that because what Salome has on her side is sex. Faster than you can say "the former Yugoslavia," she and Toby begin living together, Salome gets pregnant, and they plan to marry. Chloe freaks. What mother wouldn't? Toby is barely in his 20s. Who is this woman, and what does anyone know about her? How could Salome so handily have trapped her son?

Salome's father, Branko, lives now in Louisiana, where he runs a fishing boat with little success. Salome also has a murderous brother, Andro, who, when he hears about his sister's pregnancy, beats Toby within an inch of his life. But none of this matters. Salome is aptly named; she's a femme fatale, or has chosen to play that role for a while. Toby marries her and wakes up the very next morning to find that she's deserted him to search for her long-lost mother, who -- she thinks -- may still be alive in Europe.

Toby is crushed and bewildered. Chloe is heartbroken and rage-filled on his behalf. Branko seems felled by the desertion of his daughter. Can it really be that he escaped the war with his children and hard-heartedly left his wife behind? Meanwhile, the civilized, academic, East Coast life of Chloe and her somewhat bemused husband goes on in its peaceful-appearing tranquility, except that a poacher, some kind of foreigner, has been shooting game on their property. Chloe, her plans for her family's future disarranged, begins to turn from "charming" to what she may have been all along -- a tyrant who's fine until she doesn't get her own way.

Then we begin to hear another voice in the narrative. It's Salome's mother, Jelena, talking to someone, telling of her experiences in the war. She's living in Trieste now (for so long a historic open city), with a severely traumatized little girl she's taken with her from a refugee camp. Salome has found her, but Jelena is confiding in someone else.

As you read this mesmerizing book with its intricacies of plot, you become aware of a kind of tension, springy as a trampoline. Although this novel features one of those pointless, awful, man-made wars, the men in "Trespass" -- innocent Toby, his endlessly curious father, Salome's forthright father -- are all simply the salt of the earth. It's the women here who border on the sociopathic. They unfailingly put themselves first; they survive or they don't. This is a war novel that gives you a glimpse of what war might really mean -- the high drama, the gasping excitement -- beyond the same old bloodshed. "Trespass" revels in truth, whether power is listening or not.

Sunday in Book World

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