Badlands

Both searing and beautiful, poetic yet rooted in the particular, small in compass yet vast in imagination, this short novel is like burning magnesium or a radioactive pellet, a compact miracle of immense power. But how to describe that power without risking false impressions? If I say that this is about a woman dying of cancer, and that some of the descriptions are so painful as to be practically unreadable, it would be only part of the truth. If I call it a radiant love story, I might imply mere sentiment, while in fact its love is specific and actual, unequally requited, and achingly true. If I mention that the novel is also about the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, I would have to add that this is no mere political correctness but part of an almost spiritual vision of the wholeness of the earth and the people in it. But enough ifs! The fact was that I could hardly put the book down to go out, and rushed home to get back to it once I had. "In her dreams she lays three bones down in a limitless sea, three bones in a sea of white. What is their story?" As Caro Singleman lies dying of a cancer that is eating away her own bones, her mind keeps flashing back to the year before her marriage, when she was on an archaeological dig in the Dakotas. Those bones she found were of no interest to her professor but they conjured up a whole world for her, of love, injustice, and betrayals -- her own among them, failures that have skewed her own life since. Loved by her architect husband Daniel, worrying about her two teenage children, she drifts between the degrading realities of the present and the poisoned release of the past. Cynthia Reeves' great insight is to realize that the near-death state, the combined effects of the pain and the morphine, dissolves the normal rules of prose reality. The book that results is more a poem than a novel, a montage of themes and motifs that interlace and recur in contrapuntal form. Almost tangentially, by brushing away layers of dust, this prose-poem reveals a story that might be trite if told in any other way, but which emerges here as rich and moving. Through flashbacks and dreams, as through the daily business of care for the sick, we come to know more about Caro and Daniel as characters: intelligent, imperfectly loving, flawed but basically good human beings. And through the powerful imagination that is the one containing unity of this book, we share a vision of nature as old as earth itself, that may do nothing to ease the pain of dying, but does ultimately give some spiritual meaning to the journey. This is a novel I shall want to read more than once.

The lonely married lives of Caroline (Caro) and Daniel Singleman in Cynthia Reeves' Badlands is an intellectual, mental, and emotionally told novella of human lives lived by chance, disease, choice, guilt, and caring. For four years on campus Daniel noticed Caro, "She carried her height with the grace of a dancer." After marriage and almost grown children Caro's cancer scars her body, but her memory recalls the significant personal meetings of her life. One is reminded of the death of Ben Gant - "but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?" (Look Homeward, Angel) - Nor can we believe in the nothingness of Caro.