Idle Curiosity

Rating:
Summary: A brief, elegant, morally sophisticated novel.
Review: "What kind of a fool confuses curiosity and desire, and then thinks desire and love are the same thing?" Ed Check asks himself near the end of Martha Bergland's brief, elegant second novel, "Idle Curiosity." No fool, after all, and not so idle either, Ed is an ex-farmer and two times ex-husband who finds himself spending his old age in a residential hotel owned by his first ex-wife, Edith Flaherty, in Half Moon, Illinois.

Bergland introduces Ed as a "tiny old man in a red-and-white stirped bathrobe" whose toes in black socks and no shoes "curled and uncurled over the crumbling curb" while he waited for someone--anyone--to come by and help him with a stuck zipper. Ed might be quaint and his life stagnant, but he possesses two things that make this novel hum: daughters and a luminous sense of place. Illinois land and air are vivid personalities in the novel: "The air that morning was sweet with the scent of all the rich land it had drifted across. . . . This air, he knew, had passed not long before over his far, over what had been his farm." Though Ed longs for the farm that was sold out from under him twenty years ago, "Idle Curiosity" is not a nostalgic story about family agriculture, and the plot reveals that the loss of the farm had as much to do with the conflicting desires of men and women as it did with the economy. Ed has a heart condition--literally and figuratively--that causes him to move in and out of reveries that reveal his deep longings for his second wife, the alcoholic Marlene--"the meat of him, his heart and muscle . . . all that was left of him was wanting her"--and for the safety and happiness of his daughters: "He had seen somewhere pictures of Indian pueblos--houses--carved under and sheltered by the overhang of cliffs. That's where his love for his daughters resided--under the overhang of his ribs."

This might sound sentimental, but it's not. Much of the credit for that goes to Bergland's other lead characters: Ed's two younger girls--fortyish Janet Hawn and nineteen-year-old Vickie Check. Readers of Bergland's first novel, "A Farm Under a Lake," will recognize Janet as its narrator. In fact, "Idle Curiosity" takes up approximately when--and where--Farm came to rest, on the morning Janet arrives in Half Moon after driving her private duty nursing patient south from Wisconsin. Now Janet and almost everyone else in Half Moon will spend the summer waiting for her husband, Jack, to show up. Janet feed her dad's curiosity, especially when he realizes that Nelson Alvin, the new optometrist in town, "pays Janet a kind of attention that Jack never could or did." This love triangle--like the one of Jack, Janet, and Jack's brother Carl in "Farm"--threatens not just one marriage but Half Moon's whole comically ingrown society. Yet Ed is refreshingly unprejudiced: " He didn't even know what to wish for Janet. Should he wish for her a marriage that made sense in so many ways and at least gave her a kind of stability? . . . Or should he wish for Janet the kind of insane happiness with Nelson that he'd had with Marlene?"

Vickie, whom Ed has not seen in the ten years since Marlene left him, is endowed with her father's quick mind and acute senses: "Vickie could smell the last couple of days on him--the greasy plastics factory where he worked, the sweat he'd sweated, beers he'd drunk and pissed, cigarettes he'd smoked. He was in front of her like the front of a tree." He is Bo, and Vickie is a reverse Cinderella about to escape--cleverly--from this bad prince of a man who has knocked her up in Florida. Homeless and pregnant, "the fierce little baby inside of her forcing her to make a place for herself," Vickie steals Bo's car as her due and heads for Illinois. But first she stops in the last place she saw her mother, Vicksburg, Mississippi. There's no sign of Marlene, but two women who run a bed and breakfast in an antebellum mansion lure Vickie in--the black cook and housekeeper, Mavis Sloan, and the white proprietor, Phillipa Merton. Bergland is at her best in these Dickensian episodes. The situation among these three improbably domiciled females is so beautifully worked out, its details and dialogue so perfectly pitched, that one forgets just how unbelievable it is. These Vicksburg scenes remind me of why, in the era of the memoir, I still like to read truly inventive, realistic fiction.

Bergland constructs "Idle Curiosity" with alternating chapters about the converging lives of Ed and Vickie. After one chapter closes with the baby quickening in Vickie's belly, the next opens with Ed waking in his hide-a-bed from a dream of "little fists knocking, knocking on his ribs, knocking to be let in." When hot summer days have moved in on Half Moon and Jack has failed to appear to untangle the skein of relationships, Ed receives his second postcard from Vickie in Vicksburg. She has never sent two cards with the same postmark before, and this one initiates a manic attempt by Ed to set his world right. That heart of his finally lands him in a hospital, but it also draws his people together for a surprising conclusion in which Ed's curiosity--or rather, the use Ed makes of the fruits of his curiosity--is shown once and for all not to be idle.

"A Farm Under a Lake" is a meditative, first-person novel. In this return to Half Moon, Bergland writes a more distant, sometimes more ironic narrative, switching between Ed as her primary consciousness and the more naive but also more astringent vision of Vickie Check. The two novels together suggest that Bergland knows more than she has told so far about these people from Half Moon. Yet, "Idle Curiosity" is not a sequel--it is more a sensory elaboration and a moral complication of the earlier book. Ed's age and Vickie's youth bracket Janet's middle-aged vision, moving the characters through carefully observed, meticulously named flatland localities toward the hilltops and valleys of human desire and frustration that are Bergland's true territory.

Rating:
Summary: Moving, quiet sequel to FARM UNDER A LAKE.
Review: Bergland's first novel, FARM UNDER A LAKE, is a book I have often recommended (and given) to friends ever since I first read it. I have long awaited her second book--and here it is. It is effectively a sequel to FARM, but the writing style is more thoughtful and philosophical, befitting the now-older main character. A worthy followup to an outstanding first book, with wisdom and insights that will stick with you. Highly recommended.