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Printed
on the bottom right corner of Brian Ray's novel, Through
the Pale Door, is a circle the size of a silver dollar,
touting the book as the winner of the South Carolina First
Novel Prize. This small acknowledgement seems to be something
of a promise: an indication of a talent to watch—a guarantee
that the novel is at least good enough to win a book prize.
But while Ray certainly seems to be a talent to watch, this
debut certainly does not seem to be an example of a talent
realized.
Through
the Pale Door is the story of Sarah West, an aspiring
artist just out of high school and about to begin a summer
job at her father's steel mill factory. To do so, she must
leave her mentally unstable mother—herself an artist—in
Murietta, Georgia and move into her father's home a few hours
south. While there, Sarah meets and begins a relationship
with Edgewood, a fellow employee and renegade muralist who
sneaks back into the mill at night to paint on the walls.
Sarah's summer romance is thrown for a loop, however, when
her mother dies in a car accident.
Ray pens
some intriguing characters with realistic but oftentimes saddening
traits. Sarah's father, for instance, is an emotionally distant
workaholic so obsessed with his industry that instead of bonding
with his family, throws money at them and spends his free
time building a model replica of his own mill. Sarah's mother,
Monday, nearly evokes New Order's "Blue Monday," as both her
husband and daughter use the woman's history of mental illness
to belittle her for even the most mundane mistakes.
In Sarah,
her father's detachment and her mother's frenzy coalesce.
She grieves for her mother in private, sometimes destructive
ways but refuses to acknowledge any suffering to others. The
only time she explores her fears outwardly is in a conversation
with Edgewood about the sanity of famous artists. "Do you
ever wonder," she asks him, "what your chances are of going
crazy?" It's a stark, straightforward question common enough
among artists, but Ray makes the possibility for Sarah desperately
real.
In all
of Sarah's fears of becoming like her mother, though, she
doesn't seem to notice her resemblance to her father. In fact,
her narrative voice is so stoic that it even supersedes her
father's reticence and becomes disjointed, even unconvincing
at times, as if she were merely a documentarian of her own
life. That Sarah lacks any trace of feminine voice at all
only exacerbates the problem. Even in her most private moments
with Edgewood, she doesn't explore her thoughts or feelings
as a girl would. Few men pull off a first person female voice
passably, and even those who can, such as Junot Díaz, tend
to create women with a great deal of machismo. Sarah, however,
is too blunt in tone and too taciturn in thought to seem female.
This
detachment doesn't appear completely intentional, either,
and the lack of emotional exploration vastly undermines the
story's potential. For example, when Sarah's father reveals
that her mother's death occurred when a sheet of iron fell
off a scrap truck and crashed through Monday's windshield,
Sarah acknowledges that the accident was inadvertently related
to the steel mill. While Sarah understands that neither she
nor her father were culpable, both she and the author seem
to recognize that after years of dementia and attempted suicide,
Monday was ultimately driven to her death by factors more
related to her husband and daughter's work than her own mental
instability. Ray, however, lets Sarah get away without exploring
either the guilt or the adamant refusal of guilt over this
revelation.
Though
the main characters are fascinating, the minor characters
feel like caricatures, and the one foreigner in the book is
awkward and somewhat offensive in the way his otherness is
played for laughs. Dr. Anjalu, Sarah's vaguely Eastern European
art teacher, stumbles over syntax and oddly seems to have
a knack for idioms but difficulty with the accompanying word
choice. This, for example, is an exchange between Anjalu and
Sarah:
"That
is for none of your corporation, little one. I mean for
none of your industry, or firm."
"You mean none of my business?"
"Yes, you know what I mean."
That
Dr. Anjalu would use these turns of phrase without knowing
the key words seems unlikely, and Ray's attempt to make him
different for no apparent reason feels immature and unbecoming
of his potential.
Ray is
simply inconsistent in his writing, as if he loses track of
time and situation. During her mother's funeral, for example,
Sarah burns out her cell phone battery from overuse; miraculously,
the phone vibrates two pages later. Whether such mistakes
are the fault of sloppy writing or even sloppier editing is
hard to decipher.
Still,
Ray understands what a good story needs: fascinating characters,
strong conflict, and a few beautifully wrought statements.
Many of the flaws in Through the Pale Door feel easily
fixable, and perhaps they would have been fixed if the work
had been dissected by a better editor—one who would've
noticed at least pedestrian mistakes such as vibrating dead
cell phones or missing punctuation. Ray's uneven character
depictions, however, are no one's fault but his own. But given
the raw talent that the book does show, Ray shows promise
as an up-and-coming writer and may prove in subsequent books
to become a promise fulfilled.
(September,
2009)
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