And She Was, A Novel By Cindy Dyson

By Allen M. Jones, 2-22-06

Not unlike the way your taste in cars keeps changing, evolving (high school camaro to sensible sedan to minivan), the sort of book you read comes to be a decent poker tell for your age. Lately, in my mid-thirties, I find myself enjoying nothing so much as a well-drawn character. Maybe it’s the equivalent of a mid-life crisis, a new jaguar for the balding old man. But for a writer to breathe real life into a fictional creation, to throw the switch and make a heart thump and cheeks flush, eyelids flutter, to make an imaginary person want something, truly want something in a way that resonates, I admire that the way little leaguers still admire Hank Aaron.

The new novel by Montana author Cindy Dyson, And She Was ($24.95, William Morrow), although not unflawed, has at its tent pole core the abracadabra vibrancy of an utterly real heroine, Brandy. Brilliant but underachieving, emotionally lost but abrasive, superficially she’s the kind of person you’ve bumped into a thousand times. Buy you a drink, honey? Lighting her cigarette, you can see that whatever vulnerabilities she once possessed, the rock-tumble roll of the world calloused them over years ago. As the author lets you glimpse under these particular callouses, however, as you turn the pages, you come to realize that, in the person of this blonde bombshell, Dyson has created a character of improbable and artful complexity.

Brandy’s whole life, and in one way or another, she’s let herself be dependent upon men. Taking the easy way out rather than controlling her own situation, letting inertia guide her fate, as we first meet her, she’s trailing along behind yet another man, her most recent fling. Untypically, however, she finds this flippancy taking her to the Aleutian islands in Alaska. “Dutch Harbor appeared suddenly beyond my reflection as the ferry rounded an invisible point. I watched the lights get closer. All two of them. The ferry terminal was a scrap of light, echoed over by the water and hushed everywhere else by mountain black. It looked like a last stand against the night." Dyson’s evocation of this windswept and treeless barren rock at the end of the world is very nearly as layered as her character. “These islands are at once being born and dying. The battle of fire and water is old and living. Both will keep killing. And keep giving life. This is the edge, the slip. They are, like us, unfinished. People do not possess such places but are possessed by them." (As opposed to these brilliant explosions of landscape, we unfortunately never learn much about the character she’s following, her boyfriend Thad. He remains flat.)

In the Aleutians, Brandy finds a job cocktailing at an infamous bar, The Elbow Room. “Worst bar in the country. Playboy wrote us up as the roughest anywhere." With her evenings thus preoccupied, and with her boyfriend (somewhat too-conveniently) off on his boat, our cocaine snorting, schnapps sipping heroine finds herself with the time to gradually thread herself into the island’s existing and ongoing story, a complicated history of women struggling against starvation and circumstance, alcoholism and abuse. The obese barfly who has to be pulled from the bathroom stall; the terse librarian who doles out books only after you’ve proven yourself worthy; the “coke whore" who befriends Brandy right off the boat but just as immediately announces, “You won’t like it here." Nothing is quite what it seems. Damn near every female character the reader comes to know by name (with the exception of the gaggle of fake blondes from the competing bar, women Brandy despises because they dye their hair), has an essential core that contradicts first impressions.

Dyson intersperses Brandy’s own narrative with historical flashbacks, scenarios wherein a trio of native women (different women in different time periods) have occasion to take control of various life-threatening situations, most often with bloody consequences. “A groan, deep and empty, rose from Aya, the sound of mothers across time and place, who understand that their children have suffered and died for their sins. Allowances are made for no sound worse than this; the vibrations would rip the universe apart." From the first rumor of white men to a village wherein the men have been taken away by the Russians to a scenario of relocation in the midst of WWII, the motifs all have in common themes of female empowerment, native mysticism, a kind of terse spirituality. Not incidentally, there’s a pretty damn good mystery as well. What’s the meaning behind all the cryptic graffiti showing up in bathroom stalls across town? And that abusive husband whose body was just found bobbing in the bay? How does he fit?

As the chapters of historical flashback progress toward present day, as we begin to see the themes (strong women saving themselves and their children, although at some cost), the irony of Brandy’s own dilemma comes to the fore, and we realize how carefully Dyson has constructed the various threads of her story. Thematically, her chapters complement each other like teeth into gears. And while her political points are perhaps a bit too strident, a bit too unsubtle for my taste – “The illusion of pure and righteous victimhood slipped out of my grasp. I’d used it in all the wrong ways – my sexual power, with my tight jeans and the thrill when I knew I was wanted. But it’s an amoral power – it can go either way. It had brought me down." – they rarely cloud the compulsion of the story. About the highest complement you can pay to a novel: Once you start reading you can’t stop.

Aging into our fictions, of course, maybe ensconced in a nine-to-fiver, more often than not you come to your novels wanting simple, utilitarian distraction. Entertainment. Incredibly, one of your criteria for buying a book becomes whether or not the thing will fit into your carry-on. With its compelling questions and its exotic location, And She Was provides entertainment in spades. And yet, there’s art in the distraction. Moments of poignancy, slices of the human condition, brief bouquets of prose. Like it’s heroine, it’s a novel tough enough to hang around for a while.

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