Marion Smith. Riptide.
Salt Lake City: Signature
Books, 1999. 199 pp. $14.95.
ISBN 1-56085-131-7
Reviewed by Lavina Fielding Anderson for AML-List, Oct. 11, 2000.
In what has to be one of the most
gripping and tension-filled opening
chapters of any Mormon novel, Laurel
Greer, sixty-three-year-old mother
of five and grandmother of seven,
crouches on the floor of her ex-son-in-law's car, forces him
to drive to an abandoned road in Parley's Canyon
above Salt Lake City, makes him stop the car,
puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger,
then curls his fingers around the butt. Then
another son-in-law takes her to her car and she
drives south toward Las Vegas where, to
establish her alibi, her daughter has already
gone with Duncan, Laurel's husband.
The journey south through the night reveals the
motive for Clint's murder and draws the reader
into its moral dimensions. Laurel had been
driving her seven-year-old granddaughter
Elizabeth to her piano lesson when a chance
comment about "the baby videos" triggered such a
panicky reaction that Laurel cancelled the piano
lesson and took Elizabeth and her just-younger
brother Shawn to a therapist the next day. A
flood of sickening revelations followed: of
"parties" where Laurel's grandchildren,
including infants, were required to perform or
endure sex acts, were given treats for not
crying, and were terrorized into silence by the
slaughter of a kitten. At some of these parties,
Clint danced wearing only the tops of his temple
garments and had intercourse with his mother.
Another regular male participant was the other
counselor in the bishopric in which Clint
served. This second man's wife, the daughter of
an apostle, ran the video camera. Many men who
were strangers to the children also participated.
The children's revelations were only the
beginning. Also among Clint's victims were the
children of Laurel's other married daughters and
son, and her two youngest daughters, Jeanne and
Jasmine. At one point, Laurel and Duncan count
up thirty victims that they know of from
personal knowledge. They give up guessing how
many more there might be, including Clint's two
stepdaughters by his second marriage and the two
children he has fathered in that marriage. And
he seemed untouchable. The police aborted their
investigation, suspiciously soon after they
found out that an apostle's son-in-law was
involved, even though Duncan is from an old
Church family. A lengthy list of bishops and
stake presidents, including Clint's current
Church leaders, promises to investigate, to take
action, only to withdraw their interest and
never return phone calls. Clint's bishop even
paid his rent from fast offering funds. After
confessing and apologizing to his children,
Clint recants, once he figures out that he will
not be prosecuted. He even sues for custody of
the children. This litany of institutional
failures completes the motive for murder.
Innocent and on-going victims are revictimized
by institutional inaction until an individual,
Laurel Greer, takes action to restore justice.
But this formula is only the beginning. The
interior action of the novel is a moral
education, first in a monologue as Laurel drives
south to Las Vegas where she meets Duncan and
sends her car back to Salt Lake City with
daughter Jeanne, then in a dialogue as she and
Duncan continue on to their condo in Palm
Springs. In dense, richly allusive prose (Laurel
quotes Yeats and Star Trek, T.S. Eliot and
Wuthering Heights, plus dozens of others),
Marion Smith explores the complexities of the
human tragedy of child sexual abuse. Laurel's
sickening hatred of Clint is coupled with her
involuntary compassion for the misfit boy being
raised and trained by his incestuous mother. Her
passion for her children and her eagerness to
embrace the stability and solidity of the whole
of Duncan's Mormon heritage, given her own
partially active family's dysfunctionality, lead
directly to her bitter disillusionment as she
perceives that this very Mormonness, rather than
providing protection, made her children and
grandchildren more vulnerable to sexual abuse.
It also leads directly to doubts about God.
Duncan's journey is parallel but not identical.
He communicates the rage of a man whose entire
life has been an effort to protect and provide
for his family. His trust in the church that had
been his whole life shatters into bitter shards,
but he cannot give up his allegiance, even when
his faith is gone. As a result, his peculiar
crucifixion is his bone-deep conviction that he
has put his soul in jeopardy by yielding to
Laurel's enraged determination that she must
kill Clint; by teaching her how to use the gun
and working out the plan, he becomes an
accessory to murder. The novel reveals the
stresses placed on a marriage by the discovery
of child sexual abuse -- another manifestation
that the ripples of abuse never end. As they
drive through the night, deeper into an
uncertain future, they return repeatedly to the
anguish of their past.
This novel goes far beyond the simple formula of
frontier justice, where a right-thinking
vigilante removes a loathsome danger to the
community. Conspicuous by its absence from the
intense discussions and images is any reference
to righteous Nephi standing over drunken Laban
and hearing the Spirit command that the slaying.
Instead, the murderers whose names come to
Laurel's mind are Raskolnikov and his
unmotivated, almost experimental, murder of a
helpless old woman, Lady Macbeth violating her
fealty to a sleeping king, and Medea drawing the
blade across the throats of her own children.
These images provide a deeply ambiguous answer
to the question of justice worked out in this
novel. If this were a vigilante novel, then the
happy ending would be that Laurel gets away with
her murder and the world is well rid of another
pedophile. Instead, Laurel makes a final
decision and takes a final action in the novel's
conclusion that redresses the scales of an
impossibly complex justice.
In my opinion, however, Marion Smith's chief
contribution is to draw into the reader's
consciousness an understanding of the horror of
child sexual abuse. This statement may seem both
over-obvious and even faintly ludicrous. Is
there anyone, except for pedophiles and the
truly uneducated, who doesn't already believe
that child sexual abuse is horrible? Haven't the
experiences of abuse survivors already plowed
that dark and painful ground thoroughly? I don't
think so.
At three points in the novel, lists appear: (1)
a list of victims, (2) a list of the types of
abuse the children were forced to endure (this
is what the children told their therapist that
Clint had done to them: "Cunnilingus, object
rape, enforced fellatio, digital penetration of
anus and vagina, sodomy, fondling of breasts and
genitals, the making and showing of pornographic
films, intercourse and other sexual acts with
adults including his mother, which he forced the
children to witness"; (p. 60), and (3) a catalog
of abuse symptoms ("panic attacks, nightmare,
sexual dysfunction, dissociation, amnesia,
flashbacks, rage, terror, depression, . . . body
memories like numbness or terrible pain, . ..
eating disorders," p. 158). The clinical
language and the sheer pile-up of multi-syllabic
nouns are ultimately numbing.
Survivors' stories never fail to shock and
galvanize sympathy that connects listener and
speaker; but that completely appropriate
response of sympathy is by its very nature
outwardly directed. It separates the sympathizer
from the object of sympathy, and the space
in between is a sometimes too-comfortable
distance.
What Marion Smith has done throughout Riptide is
to create a series of images, dreams, and events
that erase that distance, creating an experience
with the emotional reality of abuse that will, I
believe, leave no sensitive reader unchanged. I
counted a score of such distance-erasing images,
beginning with the scene that gives the novel
its title. Clint and little Jasmine are playing
in the waves when they are caught by the
riptide. Duncan immediately tries to rescue
Jasmine, but the tide "would sweep them out
again like straws." Tina, another daughter, is
the strongest swimmer and understands how to
work with, not against, the riptide. Laurel
gives her permission to go out and save her
father and sister. They all survive, including
Clint, but Laurel wonders whether her son and
daughter, parents of more of Clint's victims,
would have "sacrifice[d Duncan and Jasmine] . .
. to . . . let Clint drown and their children be
saved from him." Meanwhile, she is haunted by
the image of "Clint luring everyone into the
riptide" (173).
Some of the images are those reported by the
children: Jasmine dreams of a blender in which
her loved ones are "ground together by whirling
. . . . blades" (13). In another one, a shark
circles her and Jeanne underwater, its "huge red
penis, dripping in the ocean water" (13).
Jeanne pumps up on the cabin swing, flying high
in the air, when the chain snaps on one side.
Laurel's daughter Katherine, who had been
married to Clint, stands before the wooden clock
Clint had brought back from his mission, pushing
the hands "around and around the face." It is an
image of her own terrible desire that enough
minutes will pass to signal that they have
survived (33). This same daughter terrifies
Duncan when he finds her methodically smashing
every piece of her Royal Copenhagen china on the
tiled floor of her kitchen. He is sure she is
crazy. Laurel understands that it is normal to
be crazy.
Some of the images are Laurel's nightmares. She
dreams of a tornado funnel sweeping toward them,
its winds so powerful that they can't yank up
the door that would lead them into the safety of
the storm cellar; the wind catches the baby's
body and batters it against the door "like a
ball on a yo-yo string, breaking" the fragile
bones (30). She dreams of a cozy miniature
living room inside a decorated Easter egg where
her family is "safe"; then she picks up the egg
and shakes it. She is simultaneously tiny,
inside the egg, crashing into the furniture with
her bruised and bleeding family, and outside,
doing the shaking (160). She is a moth, blending
into the soft dust, a pile "of gray cinder-block
bricks placed on top of me--neatly stacked--no
one know that I am here." She can still breathe,
barely, but the bricks keep stacking higher,
crushing her (163). Her best-beloved doll falls
out of the car window; her father refuses to go
back for it (51). She dreams of her family on
strings being dipped into a volcano and being
"pulled out twisted and grotesque with
lava crusting on us" (57). She repeatedly thinks of
rocks --"black, deformed, lava, habitable only to
black crags and bare bleeding feet" or "smooth stream-
rounded pebbles, wet and sensuous, their curvings
indifferent to human fingers" (118). On a family trip,a berserk Moroccan had run through the ferry to
Tangier "stabbing strangers" until a tourist "hit him on the head with a bottle" while Laurel searched
desperately for four-year-old Jasmine who had gotten
separated from the family (83). One night, she hears a
young elk, trapped in their metal gate in the deep
snow. It screams and screams "like Cathy at the
window" in Wuthering Heights,"trying to come in . . . a child who must scream alone in the cold night"
(98). In a game of musical chairs at a birthday party, "a giant male foot in a brown polished shoe" appears above the children, then smashes down, grinding the
children and the chair splinters into the carpet
"while Tina goes on trying to announce who's won and I bring in the hot dogs and the red Jell-O and the
potato chips" (111-12). A hangman's noose dangles from the branches of a dead tree, enlarging itself until
Laurel can seat herself in it as if it were a
child's swing (115). Clint is a huge "black crab"
crawling after the "miniature" family, his enormous
claws picking up the child that Laurel had "forgotten to hide" (159-60). A little boy is sinking in
quicksand and can't hold on to the stick Laurel reaches to him from the side (160). A granddaughter
swings out over a cliff edge, then dives straight into the "dark pool" below. She doesn't come up. "None of us could jump to her. We stared at the water and
couldn't move" (160). And there are more.
These images recreate the emotional reality of sexual abuse--the helplessness, the insanity, the
nightmarishness, the meaninglessness, and above all,
the terrible, unending pain. I could not read them
unmoved, unchanged. I could not read them with only
admiration for Marion Smith's technical facility and
her skill with language. Reading them is an experience
with the riptide of sexual abuse.
Smith was not well-served by the publisher's
production. Although the novel's action is dated
precisely to 1994, seven years after the discovery of
the abuse, the cover, in muddy shades of greenish-
yellow and gray, misleadingly shows a woman with a
short waved hair style from the early 1950s, flanked
by young daughters with bangs and pageboys from the
same period. Ellipses are shown unspaced, making eye-
jerking clots on the page. M-dashes have been rendered
as N-dashes, making it virtually impossible not to
read some as hyphens. Typographical errors abound:
both "MacBeth" and "Macbeth" (correct), "grey"
(British spelling), "Mommie/Mommy," and "their's." But
these defects in presentation should not be allowed to
detract from this remarkable journey in moral
education and in the emotional realities of sexual
abuse that Riptide provides.
In an image pivotal to the action of the novel, Laurel recalls lying on the
edge of the Grand Canyon at dawn when she was fifteen, feeling the world
turning under her, unable to tell where the sandstone stops and her cheek
begins. "Perhaps lying there alone at dawn was the best single moment of my
life," she thinks. To get there she had followed a path through the Kaibab
forest:
Over and over during the past seven years, I watch myself walk that path.
. .
. There's no hurry, but I have to keep moving. I go to the rim and its purple
shadows. There's no fear or pain in that. I don't want to die, but perhaps
there'll be no choice. One step and I'll be part of the shadow. It feels good
to have that option. It's my biggest comfort. I must go to the very edge and
look down and then decide. No one can come near me there, alone. Two German
tourists disappeared from that path this summer. I envy them.
Over and over this scene is my escape. It's beautiful and awesome and
obsessive. Sometimes it's irresisble.
I know I can't turn around on the path
to the canyon. I can stop on the edge but
not turn around. I try hard to think if
there are other choices. I concentrate
while I look at the ever-changing light
and shadow. (45)
Marion Smith puts the reader on that path with
Laurel Greer. The precipice is not just the
hunger for oblivion and surcease from pain; it
is also the decision of each reader whether to
accept his or her own culpability in a world
where innocence is violated in terrible ways. We
can plunge over into the obliterating answers of
denial or we can "stop on the edge" where rescue
can occur, but we "can't turn around on the
path."
