The Sharp Teeth of Love

Christian Century, Oct 8, 1997 by Trudy Bush

You're so sweet, I could just eat you up, a mother croons, while nibbling her baby's toes. The sinister undertones of love hinted at in such endearments figure powerfully in Doris Betts's new novel. The book explores love's sharp teeth that can tear and devour as well as nourish and save.

Luna Stone, a sometime anorexic, sets out for California to get married, but leaves the man in Nevada, and after a sojourn in the wilderness she travels to Wisconsin to marry someone else. The first part of the story is a portrait of a relationship in which one partner feeds upon the other. As Luna grows thinner and thinner, Steven, her handsome fiance, grows fatter. They live on her money while he hoards his. She knows that he will leave her one day, after she has helped him advance through the academic ranks and has ceased to be useful to him.

As the couple nears Reno, Luna becomes increasingly fascinated with a tale of cannibalism from pioneer days. It's about the Donner party, which became marooned in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevadas and was driven to eat their own dead. Luna is especially haunted by Tamsen Donner, who could have escaped but who stayed behind with her dying husband. Luna struggles to understand Tamsen's decision. Was it a matter of self-sacrificing love or passive acquiescence to a selfish demand? The icy suffering and death of the pioneers is told in counterpoint to the fiery deaths of David Koresh and his followers at Waco, Texas, which occurs during Luna and Steven's journey.

After Luna leaves Steven to camp near the place where Tamsen Donner died, she finds and wins the trust of a runaway named Sam--a boy who had been sold by his family into child prostitution. While hiking together in a place called Desolation Wilderness they meet Paul, who had been planning to go to seminary until he lost most of his hearing in an accident. Luna speaks to Paul because when she first comes upon him he is reading Kafka. Years earlier, while depressed and lonely and working on a term paper about Kafka's stories, she had fallen into anorexia and a mental breakdown. Paul is reading the book because the cover photograph shows Kafka's large and pointed ears. Perhaps a man with such ears, Paul thinks, will have something useful to say about deafness and hearing.

With his deep Lutheran faith, Paul finds biblical analogies for the events of his life. Luna, a cradle Catholic, tells him, "Nobody else I know even mentions God.... He's deader than Tamsen Donner to the people I know."

As Luna and Paul struggle with the theological questions raised by the suffering and evil they encounter, especially when Sam is taken from them by his abusers, Luna too begins to see analogies between her experiences and those of biblical figures. When she rages against God for not protecting Sam, Paul feels that he has no answer. "Did I dare say that for all I knew one deaf vagrant and one furious runaway bride might be God's only healers conveniently by?" he asks himself. And, indeed, the deaf vagrant and the runaway bride-to-be do manage, with a little help from providence, to rescue Sam and to take the leap of faith into marriage and family.

One of the delights of Betts's novels is her sympathetic and realistic account of older people. One of the most memorable characters in this novel is Erika Cowen, Paul's mother--a shrewd farm woman who "takes for granted that God would be on her side in removing any hurt boy from wicked Reno to pastoral Wisconsin" and who acts "with the serene confidence of some Old Testament prophet."

While always aware that people can hurt and devour each other and call it love, Betts also holds up the possibility of a love that redeems and heals through self-giving.