Trespass, a New Novel by Valerie Martin
Valerie Martin’s new novel, Trespass, achieves a rare balance between a powerful anti-war message and contemporary literature. Martin’s first novel since her Orange Prize-winning Property, Trespass portrays a privileged, intellectual family, Chloe and Brendan Dale and their cherished son, Toby, a junior at NYU. Chloe is frankly jealous of her son’s lovers, and especially so of Salome Drago, a “foreign girl;†a Croat from Louisiana; a Catholic; daughter to Branko, “The Oyster King.†Despite being a girl on scholarship, she further projects an aloof and severe manner.
Syncopated within these apparently familiar destinies is an italicized, first-person voice, almost whispery at first, which belongs to a decisive and calmly selfish mystery woman. Unnamed until the last third of the book, this outspoken but soft-spoken woman mirrors Chloe Dale. They’re both strong, intelligent mothers who remain attractive despite wielding their personal entitlement and beliefs against their children.
The Dale family joins Toby’s group of anti-war students in an “out of Iraq†rally. They agree that the Democrats elected to Congress are cowards. Interspersed with these scenes, fraught with tension as Toby and Salome’s relationship becomes definite, the mystery woman’s story gradually brings the atrocity of the Serbian/Croatian war so close to the Dales’ cozy lives in the Catskill Mountains that it factors, albeit indirectly, in the family’s dissolution.
While much of Trespass recalls light, palatable novels about academic families, the dark secrets and aftermath of a recent war enmesh the family in a remarkable and complex web. Ms. Martin’s deft touch sets the plot so carefully that the reader hardly notices as a subterranean penchant for violence insinuates everyone’s life. Trespass risks seeming ordinary when it very much is not.
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