Uncomfortable secrets drive 'Appearances'

Jennie A. Camp, Special to the News

Published January 13, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Books

For Steven Howe, life is good: His marriage is strong, his career as a litigator for personal injury ski accidents is thriving and his three grown children are confident, successful people.

But when Steven's mother dies, two subsequent events stir his contented life into disarray: His daughter, Jennifer, is diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease that explains her tunnel vision and will eventually lead to blindness, and Steven learns that the father he thought was long deceased is indeed alive and serving a life sentence in the Colorado State Penitentiary.

Joanne Greenberg's newest novel is an insightful exploration of how we react when the pinnacles we have achieved crumble and life must be rewritten. Unfortunately, although Greenberg allows the characters in Appearances ample time to explore the new emotions they are confronting, she doesn't let the novel be the character-driven tale it wants to be. Instead, plot determines the direction and pace of Appearances, which unfortunately makes the novel at times seem contrived and overwritten.

As Steven learns of his father, for example, the search becomes a kind of game and, rather than co-players, readers will begin to feel like the only ones not yet in on the secret. Several characters, including Steven and Jennifer, prefer to hold onto their truths until those around them are either hurt or terribly uncomfortable: Steven doesn't tell his wife, Connie, about his father's existence until he has gone to visit Lon in Cañon City, and Connie clearly feels betrayed by her husband's lengthy silence. Even when Jennifer is diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, she insists on delaying her announcement until everyone is present and she can say it in her own way. When Steven protests - "Listen, Jen, it'll be tomorrow evening before Jeremy might get in from Boulder. Can't I know something about what's going on? This isn't a drama where we all need the suspense." - Jennifer refuses to bend.

Although there may be a lesson in watching characters hurt one another with their silences, readers don't necessarily need to experience the same angst as we wait for Greenberg to slowly peel the details away.

Greenberg's sense of the complexities of human relations, on the other hand, is astute and, at times, surprisingly layered.

When Steven decides to relax with a Scarlatti CD, for example, he admits that Connie is the one who introduced him to the cultured life - Connie, who is now distancing herself from their marriage with her abhorrence of his father's imprisonment:

"His deepest everyday pleasures had come from her, but now he felt a bitter, thwarted annoyance at her. He wished he could make her more sympathetic. She had conceded to him before in her bright, kind way. She'd understood his drawing back before the cheerful inundation of her family, his caution about food, money, change. This challenge, of course, was different. Her fear and love were bound up in protection, her loathing in what she saw Lon Howe doing in her imagination. He sat in the dark and let the music cleanse his mind with its intricate rational mathematics, the restrained order that had often stunned him with its beauty."

When Steven finally divulges to Connie what he has learned about his father, he is impressively self-aware: "He introduced his subject in the lawyerlike way to which she had become reconciled years ago. It was the way he had proposed marriage, the way he had introduced his going off on his own when he had been doing well with Blakely and Milan."

Greenberg effectively pulls together the cases that Steven is currently litigating, the tensions in Steven and Connie's marriage, and the gradual unfolding of an adult relationship between Steven and his father so that all of the novel's strands rest intriguingly under the greater analogy of Jennifer's gradually decreasing peripheral vision. Much as his daughter is becoming more and more dependent on flashlights, a cane and other aids to help her see, so, too, have Steven's assumptions about his childhood and subsequent adult life been increasingly narrowed by the revelations about his father.

Best known for her 1962 novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Greenberg has published 13 novels and four short-story collections. In Appearances, we see the unpredictability of life and, beneath the nuanced first appearances, the realities that are not always as comfortable as we might like them to be.

Appearances

• By Joanne Greenberg. Montemayor Press, 294 pages, $15.95.

• Grade: B

Jennie A. Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review and other publications. She lives in Platteville.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News