Taken In - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Robert Wexelblatt

Beverly Coyle. New York: Viking Press, 1998. 305pp. $24.95 (cloth).

Beverly Coyle and Nadine Gordimer have written superb new novels about murder, but neither is a murder mystery. Set in North Florida and South Africa respectively, each tells with intelligent, irresistible sympathy how self-consciously decent middle-class families are devastated by, struggle to comprehend, and begin to recuperate from violence. Coyle conducts us ever more deeply into the inner lives of her characters, individuating and isolating them from their townsfolk, work and school, while Gordimer correlates the intimate suffering of her characters to the public and political. Both novelists disclose unexpected truths about families, sex, class, religion, and ethics, generating significance even beyond what their books convey to societies beset by violence and the ready accessibility of guns. These novels about murder are not concerned with the superficial question of who did it; they are tales of response and reflection rather than suspense, stories that ask how and why the irremediable can invade apparently secure lives and what humanity can be built on the wreckage.

The disaster at the center of Taken In is the fatal shooting of Susan Robb, wife, mother, high school teacher, love-object. She and her husband, Malcolm, admissions director for a small college, have two children: Matt, a high-school senior who has been eccentrically religious since he was eleven and may be a saint; and Gretchen, fifteen, stage-struck, quick-witted. Matt's religiosity is a mystery and an anxiety to his parents; his father fears that he has become a fundamentalist or will join some cult. As a child Matt insisted on giving away all the money he could and also his clothing, saving only the one coat allowed by the Bible. The boy's indiscriminate compassion leads him to try to help a runaway girl, Angela Bert, entangling his family and a lonely neighbor, Oren Abel, with her and her druggy, sociopathic companion, Cooper Reece. Oren, in love with Susan who has told him to "be bold," decides to make a project of Angela. He gives her his house on condition that she not see Cooper. But Cooper shows up at once and, in a jealous rage, shoots Susan, runs off with Angela, and overdoses days later in a motel.

"Taken In" - it can signify arrested, fooled, given a home. Coyle has chosen the title of this, her third novel, cleverly, for it means all of these but most of all the last. Strangely, redemption begins when Angela is taken in by the Robbs. Matt goes off to work at a camp for disturbed boys; Gretchen leaves school and Malcolm his job. Oren liberates himself by wearing a dress and works out his guilt by becoming part of the isolated extended family that, occupying two facing suburban houses, nourished by forgiveness and understanding, grows from the ruins on what was. Out of what goodness has inadvertently destroyed, goodness of another sort emerges, a transformingly generous and patient love.

At the start of the novel Malcolm Robb's biggest worry is what college his oddball son will be able to get into, or if the boy will go at all. He feels like the shoemaker whose child is barefoot. Will Matt even write the requisite application essay? Gretchen, at the start, looks like a version of the wisecracking teenager of the sit-coms. Oren Abel sits in his mansion immured in loneliness and shame for his father, a lawyer who stole from his clients and then killed himself. These conventional, constricted lives are shattered by an invasion of low-life. Susan Robb's death, a catastrophe that is the consequence of Matt's and Oren's charity, alters everything for everybody. By the end Coyle has led everyone into a miraculous new country.

The novel seems to have a concentrated action, a few characters in the foreground; in fact, Coyle imagines in detail more than we could ask. She gives us not just a family but a whole town, with its politics, history, disintegrating marriages; she gives us satire, sociology, religious and sexual speculation. The action ramifies, expands, touching and testing everyone who matters.

Coyle is wonderful at delineating character, not just her major ones, but even her walk-ons. For example, a social worker appears once and briefly only thirty pages from the end of the book, and yet we come to know her inside and out. There is never anything generic about Coyle's characters, nothing prefabricated or second-hand. And their range is astonishing: suburbanites, trailer trash, dopeheads, doctors, cops, waitresses, college boys, schoolchildren, toddlers. With the patience of the best novelists Coyle never hurries her plot but savors each development, knowing that the savoring can be of greater worth than the event.

Coyle writes so well of serious matters that her humor can sneak up on you. For example, of Oren's failed attempts with women, she writes: "The last time he'd tried anything physical, he'd been impotent, and the woman had gotten so hysterical about it (about herself) that none of it had seemed worth it to him anymore, especially now that there was cable."