Camden, Maine: Down East Books, 2007.
A fairy tale where dreams come true
This novel, by Peaks Island resident Eleanor Morse, reads as a kind of fairy tale for adults, catching four people in the crux of personal crises. Horace Woodruff, a middle-aged but not yet ready to retire lawyer in Connecticut, has been fired unexpectedly from his job, essentially because he’s too principled. His wife, Beverly, having completed a series of paintings for a gallery show and a stint teaching art to prisoners, is facing her own middle-age crisis, not only about her work but what to do with her family’s now-empty house on the Maine island of Vinalhaven, where she and her sister grew up. One of the young men Beverly taught in jail is Oz, released not long after they meet. He’s hoping to stay out of prison after two incarcerations but isn’t sure he can start fresh. And Lucy, his sometime girlfriend, is an albino, unsure anyone could really love her. She feels unappreciated by her family, her boyfriend and her boss. Each of these characters is on the cusp of change; they just don’t know what shape it will take or where it will lead.
At these vulnerable moments, Morse — as Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm would have done — provides each of them with a defining moment: the opportunity to do something different. That the plot seems a bit too contrived in order to accomplish that could be because it’s a first book for the author. Morse can be heavy-handed, as if in compensation for a fear she isn’t explaining enough and therefore says too much about, often over-describing her characters and offering meticulous detail. At times we can’t see the forest for the trees.
The story centers on trees, in fact. A thousand of them, spruce seedlings from the U.S. Forest Service that Horace ends up with, a mistake he decides was serendipitously meant for him as a kind of rehab, a reason to travel to northern Maine and plant an unexpected forest. Oz gets incorporated into the plan. Beverly decides she’ll go to Vinalhaven and see what future the house holds, and Lucy is persuaded to come along. And what happens to Lucy is — well, why give away the ending? With its fairy tale formula, you might even guess what it is.
Fairy tales offer possibilities that, in a completely reality-based context, would be unbelievable. A kiss can turn a frog into a handsome prince…a fairy godmother can make your dreams come true…and, really, can people live happily ever after? In Morse’s book, the “after” — the outcomes of all those crises — suggests she hopes they at least get the opportunity to try. When Horace finds out the trees he planted had been intended for laboratory testing, to observe the effects of toxins, stresses, and pathogens in a study of “what kills them,” he considers he has saved them from “murder.” To be replanted in Maine dirt and given new opportunity, a second chance — whether tree or human — would seem to be, in Morse’s story, equivalent to the power of a kiss, or the waved wand. q
When she’s in Maine, Tina Cohen reads and writes on Vinalhaven.