Author: Marion Smith
Title: Riptide
Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999.
Trade paperback: xii, 191 pp. ISBN: 1-56085-131-7.
Suggested retail: $14.95.
(Reviewed by Terry L. Jeffress, on AML-List, June 22, 2000. It also appeared in the Autumn 2000 issue of Irreantum.)
Laurel Greer learns that her son-in-law Clint has sexually abused her
grandchildren, the neighborhood kids, and her own youngest children. No one discovered the abuse for years until Clint’s daughter Elizabeth (then seven years old) finally told Laurel. Clint’s wife, Katherine, decides that her three children will not testify against their father, and the other parents follow her example. Without the children’s testimony, the prosecutor won’t file charges and the police call off their investigation. The Greers bristle as Clint escapes responsibility for his actions, but almost worse, the Mormon church doesn’t take any disciplinary action.
Riptide starts several years later. After Clint loses his job for sexually harassment, Laurel decides to take matters into her own hands and kills Clint. The story then follows Laurel’s stream of consciousness as she drives from the crime scene in Parley’s Canyon, Utah, to her carefully crafted alibi in Palms Springs, California. As Laurel remembers, we get a picture of her life, filled with efforts to craft a perfect Mormon family and shattered by the actions of one man. In retrospect, she thinks she recognizes warning signs that she should have acted on earlier to prevent or limit Clint’s damage. Between the self-blame and guilt, Laurel seems barely coherent.
At one point Laurel compares Clint to a rock thrown into a pool. Laurel
can clearly see how Clint’s actions have a ripple effect and changed the lives of many people, but she doesn’t see that by killing Clint she has thrown her own rock into the pool. Laurel does try to minimise her family’s association with the murder, but she never extends this
sentiment to Clint’s children by his second marriage or to the rigors of
a murder trial.
With such a dismal story line, Riptide has some other agenda than
pure entertainment. In her “Author’s Note,” Smith states:
This story is fiction. There are, however, many cases of abuse similar to that described in this book. Often these cases are reported to both police and ecclesiastical leaders, yet no action is taken. While details of individual stories differ, the effects of child abuse and reactions to it seem remarkable similar. (vii)
Smith wants to demonstrate the wide scope of damage caused by child sexual abuse, with a secondary message to criminal prosecutors and ecclesiastical leaders to take greater action toward sexual abuse cases. For me personally, true stories (such as Pelzer’s A Child Called “It”) more effectively demonstrate the horrors of child abuse and the needs for child protective services. And when an author wants to make me aware of a problem, I also want to see some possible solutions. Smith provides a counter-solution. She shows us what doesn’t work. Perhaps she believes in prevention as the only solution.
Smith also takes an anti-Mormon tone, repeatedly mentioning how the church failed the Greers. Laurel feels betrayed by the church because even though her daughter married a returned missionary in the temple, he still turned into an abuser. Of course, just for extra jabs at the church, Clint didn’t act alone. The daughter of an unnamed Mormon apostle participated in Clint’s abuse factory. Laurel believes that the close association to an apostle’s daughter caused the investigators and prosecutors to avoid Clint’s case.
Laurel concludes that if she could live her life again, that she wouldn’t raise her kids in the church:
I’ve never told Duncan [her husband] that if I had my life to do over, I wouldn’t raise my children in the church. It’s too punishing and can make their parents treat their children in ways that are destructive. Even with all the good it can do, I wouldn’t do it again. It seems too cruel to tell Duncan what I sometimes wonder — that the abuse might not have happened, or we might have been able to see it sooner, if we hadn’t been Mormon. (153-4)
In spite of Smith’s assertion that abuse cases seem “remarkably similar” to this fiction, I had a hard time relating to the Greer family. Duncan works as an investment broker, and Laurel works in all the auxiliary branches of the church. The Greers took vacations in England, South Africa, Hawaii, and the Mediterranean. They fly to New York City just to buy a wedding dress. They fly to Mexico, to bring their daughter on a student exchange news of the abuse. They fly to India to make sure one of their daughters gets safely to a volunteer position in a leper colony. I know too many real families that live in near poverty resulting from putting one child through therapy or a recovery program, that the Greer’s suffering feels hollow.
Smith drops enough literary references to keep a humanities student busy for a semester. She mentions Crime and Punishment, Hamlet, the works of Homer, The Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights, King Lear, The Plague, The Adventures of Don Quxiote, and others. That list includes only literary references; Smith gives about equal time given to philosophy, film, music, TV, and religious references.
While the humanities students work out the literary references, psychology students can practice dream interpretation. Laurel relates both her own and her daughters’ dreams, rife with Freudian content:
I one of my dreams, Clint was a monster-size black crab with huge pincers reaching everywhere for all of us. We were tiny, miniature people burrowing in the sand as he slowly crawled toward us. There was always a child I’d forgotten to hide, and as his claws picked up that child, I would wake up. (159-60)
A well written dream can say a lot about a character’s emotional state.
One or two related dreams would sufficiently characterize Laurel and her daughters. Instead, Smith includes at least 10 dreams, most of which demonize Clint and do nothing to further expand Laurel’s character.
She creates vivid scenes filled with emotional power, but her scenes
repeat the same character and plot development without moving into new territory. You can also see Smith’s agenda driving the characters’ dialog into contrived paths that never get around to answering the real question: What should we do with a heightened awareness of abuse?