Trespass [Paperback]

In Valerie Martin's vigorous and exquisitely written Trespass the battle lines are drawn when the hardscrabble immigrant experience clashes with the delicacies of middle-class America. Chloe and Brendan Dale live a charmed life of middle-aged bourgeois respectability in the Catskills. Chloe is an art illustrator who is working on some etchings of a book about Wuthering Heights and Brendan is a successful college professor currently writing a book about the fifth crusade.

When Chloe meets her twenty-one year old son Toby for lunch at a chic and fashionable Manhattan restaurant, the gathering is plagued with tension. Toby is about to introduce Chloe to Salome Drago, a young girl of Croatian decent who has recently moved to New York study and who originally hails Louisiana. Both Toby and Salome met in the same political science class where they showed up to organize a campus group opposed to the Iraqi War.

An easygoing young man, Toby has spent much of his life guided by the good will of Chloe and Brendan, and has indeed basked in the years of love and support from his proud parents, therefore, Toby fully expects to Salome to meet with their approval and hopefully charm his mother. The luncheon, however, doesn't go the way that Toby expects.

With Chloe's mind full of self-congratulatory musings, Toby doesn't suspect that her heart is already set against this dark-headed, odd girl that she suspects her son has extracted from some "refugee swamp," and setting her down before her in this perfectly respectable corner of New York. Salome certainly looks intelligent, she's not a classic beauty, but certainly lovely and compelling nonetheless.

Chloe reacts to Salome with a grave mixture of resentment and suspicion, "that devious creature with her cold eyes and hot body, with her peasant's build," and she gravitates between stabs of pity and animosity for this poor young girl, so clearly out of her element and on the defensive. Conversely, Brendan thinks that Chloe is an improvement over her predecessors and is determined to treat her kindly; after all she's a scholarship girl, and her father is a fisherman and an immigrant.

Brendan proves he's up to the mark - supportive, understanding, confident, but masking his concern beneath a veil of goodwill. Meanwhile, Chloe's outrage is balanced against the idealistic Toby who believes that his affair with Salome somehow holds the possibility of changing the world. But when at a family dinner, Toby reveals to his parents that Salome is pregnant, the Dales suddenly find themselves catapulted into the history of Salome's life where the past and present inevitably collide.

On a trip back to Louisiana to visit Branko Drago, Salome's immigrant father, Toby becomes the intruder and an interloper, and although for a moment he feels himself curiously at home, the seeds of doubt do set in and he tries hard not to hear a voice which says, "You know nothing about her, How can you even be sure. " It is also in Louisiana, however, that Toby learns of Branko's kindly acceptance and liberality and his violent past during the Yugoslavian War, where he witnessed the death of his mother, wife, son, and his narrow escape to a new world.

Martin skillfully intertwines the fate of Chloe, Brendan and Toby with that of the Drago family, particularly that of Salome's mother Jelena who, as the narrative progresses, gradually becomes a powerful and surprisingly influential character in the story and her struggles to survive in the war-torn Croatia in the early 1990's become a powerful symbol and a fierce juxtaposition to Brendan and Chloe's cautious and wary solicitude.

The Trespass of the title is really a reflection of the characters darkest fears and their inability to trust their instincts: Chloe protests against the injustice of her son's attraction to a woman she doesn't trust, who threatens her in the tender, vulnerable core of her motherhood; Salome, a woman with enormous self-confidence as she coolly assesses any opposition to her views, her look teeming with defiance and calculation.

There's Salome's father the noble immigrant considered the "Oyster King," though insufficiently royal to pay for his clever daughter's college education, and Toby who once didn't have a care in the world, but is now responsible for an unborn child, and has been forced to defend his mate with his fists. Finally there's Brendan, the reserved academic who passed has passed much of his life buried in books and ink, absorbed in the past, timorous with the present, yet plunged into the future, and to a life in another country. Mike Leonard October 07.

Trespass is an excellent read. It is very thought provoking, covering a number of themes, and generated good discussion at our book group!

Valerie Martin won the Orange Prize in 2003 with Property a story of slave and mistress during the American Civil War. She shows her versatility and her talent by writing another compelling story set in modern times but going back to the Balkan conflict in one of its main story-lines. When Toby brings his new girlfriend, Salome Drago, home to meet his Mom and Dad, there is immediate conflict. She's poor and her father is an immigrant, while Toby's father is a tenured academic historian and his mother a book illustrator. Toby is still at college and his mother is fearful that the girl has latched onto Toby as a provider. When they later announce that Salome is pregnant all Toby's mother's fears are confirmed.

The novel later moves some of the protagonists to Trieste in the extreme north of Italy, and here we learn of Salome's mother's story - a harrowing experience in the Balkans, with Serb, Croatian and Muslim at each other's throats.

It is the past that holds the key to the future - the trespass of the title is both actual and metaphorical - that of Salome into the American middle-classes and an actual trespass by a Basque immigrant which ends in tragedy. The bare outline given above does not do justice to this richly intriguing, compelling and very readable novel.