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These
are the people who are not like everyone else—the poorly
dressed, natty-haired girl from P.E. class who slept with
everyone, the soft fat kid who would never be able to fulfill
his potential, that creepy boy who taxidermied roadkill. Edgar
Mollère, in driven or forced onward by or as if
by wind or water, explores the lives of three children
raised in a rural community with seemingly little adult intervention
by the stepmother they hate or their non-communicative Vietnam
vet father. These almost feral children are left to figure
out life for themselves and focus on the rudiments of survival,
sex, death, and food. Mollère never treats them as
magical creatures or pariahs, making driven or forced
a compelling, difficult experience.
Watt,
Sister, and Tubby are the sort of kids readers know of but
probably don't know very well, and Mollère does a great
job of not making them stereotypes. Tubby clings to his stepmother
and overeats, but he has an acute interest in science and
an intelligence that seems way beyond the limited language
he uses in his school reports. Sister uses sex as a way to
gain entry into social circles she would otherwise be denied
but also uses it to chip away at her lack of identity and
discover her core self. Watt, the oldest of the three, has
taken on the role of patriarch due to his father's post-traumatic
stress disorder, but being ill-prepared for such duties, he
decides to teach Tubby that what it is to be a man is to track,
kill, and dress game. All the children are presented as having
self-knowledge, but they are powerless to stop their destructive
behaviors.
Mollère's
style is experimental, and the book itself is formatted in
a variety of ways. Sometimes two characters talk at once,
the page split down the middle. Sometimes the focus is on
one character, but the thoughts are disjointed and meander
across the page. Much of driven or forced reads like
an extended prose-poem, with evocative, visceral phrases that
emphasize the raw, immediate lives of these three kids. The
sections that work the best are the ones in which two character's
monologues overlap in vertical columns; it gives readers the
sense of seeing a movie on a split screen with stories that
intersect and diverge. In one particularly stirring section
early in the book, Tubby tells a story of how Watt sticks
up for him: "He's quiet but he broke a big kid's knee with
an old rusty adze one time. The boy was bigger and had a face
like a mule's." Meanwhile, in Watt's section, he repeats "Broken
bones. Broken bones" for two pages.
There
is only a tenuous plot in driven or forced of Watt
tracking a big buck and trying to teach this skill to Tubby;
it is a character-driven book, and readers are allowed to
enter the deep, private thoughts of the three children, disturbing,
introspective and naïve. The book is told almost exclusively
by the inner dialogue of the three children as they think
about their family, school, or tracking game. Although the
father hardly appears in the book, his influence on the children,
especially Sister, is evident. In one passage, she writes
an imaginary story about how she and her father go rafting
in the Colorado River; in another, she describes what his
voice is like: "It's true he didn't talk much… and probably
even less to his 'little girl,' as I was known… but when he
did, it was all warm honey and oats."
Readers
may tire of some of the dialect—all the characters say
"ta" for "to," for example—and it may not have been necessary
to carry this vernacular through the entire book. Readers
will understand that the characters are smart but uneducated
pretty early on. But the stylistic tics are not all that distracting.
Some of the more chaotic pages are very hard to follow, and
although that may be the intent, it doesn't further the story
as well as it should. The story gets particularly disorderly
towards the end, and since there is quite a bit of action
occurring readers may be left a little perplexed.
But the
beautiful prose that tells of the basic drives of human nature
will stick with readers much longer than any confusion about
the ending. Mollère has written a gorgeous book about
violence and sadness that bursts with life.
(February,
2009)
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