Dodging and Burning
Dodging and Burning opens with a letter from Bunny Prescott to her estranged childhood friend Martha Bliss. A disturbing crime scene photograph of a beautiful murdered woman named Lily has arrived with no return address, and Bunny wants to know if Martha sent it to her. The horrifying yet seductive photo was taken fifty-five years ago by a young man, Jay Greenwood, to whom they both had intimate ties and who first showed them the image in 1945 weeks before the end of the war. The mysterious package sets both women on a journey into the past, compelling each to tell her version of what happened that summer.
At the center of the story is Jay, a young war photographer, wounded on the front in Belgium and home again, trying to mend his body and spirit. He tells Bunny and Martha that he stumbled on Lily's body on a walk in the woods and in a frantic gesture took pictures of the evidence. However, when he leads them to the scene of the crime, the body is gone, and the only clue is a pair of bloodied women's shoes.
Only twelve at the time, Martha is grieving over the loss of her brother Robbie in the Pacific and is trying to escape the self-indulgently morbid atmosphere her mother and father have cultivated in her home. The mystery of the dead woman seems no different to her than the salacious pulp detective magazines her brother read to her before he left for the war. Jay encourages this fantasy as a way of drawing Martha close to him, for he too lost Robbie, his best friend and would be lover, in the war.
Bunny, an attractive, aspiring sophisticate of eighteen, wishes to be sensible to go to the police about the photos, but allows Jay to convince her and Martha to investigate the crime on their own. Bunny is hopelessly in love with Jay and unable to understand why he doesn't return the love. Her frustrated desire makes her suspicious of him and his true motivations for bringing the photographs to them. As she begins to sort reality from illusion, the truth behind the photographs merges.
Dodging and Burning is the story of two women's desire to understand the young man they both loved--a soldier ravaged by war and rejected by his home, an artist who only found solace through the lens of a camera. Woven between the narratives of both women is pulp detective story, "A Date with Death," which serves as, perhaps, the most important clue to the puzzle of what motivates Jay and the role he plays in shaping his fate.
photo credit: Nic Persinger, model: Julianna Corby
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(updated: January 31, 2010)
The Whitest of Dreams
Told in two time periods, The Whitest of Dreams is about a wealthy young woman's evolution into a visionary artist. On a spring night in 1923, Margaret Vanderstel vandalizes her own bedroom with an ax, and her uncle, Henry, who became her guardian after her parents died in a train accident, sends her to a private mental institution for a rest cure. At the hospital, she becomes romantically involved with a young psychologist, Avery Matthews, who finds himself drawn to her and the mystery behind her poignant yet violent outburst. As his patient, she begins to explore her emotional puzzle through art, which compels her to create haunting, life-size, humanoid sculptures.
The novel shifts between 1923 to 1995, using Margaret's journals and Avery's notes as textual bridges over time. In 1995, Colby, a young art dealer, returns to his home town, Royal Oak, Virginia, where as a boy, he encountered one of her sculptures. So potent was his impression of the figure that he wants to bring it and any others like it into the art world, taking advantage of outsider art's growing popularity. In his search for the sculptures, he meets Alice, Margaret's granddaughter, who still lives in the Vanderstel home. Love sparks between them, fueled by Colby's desire to know more about Margaret's past, which then becomes a quest to discover Alice's true parentage, particularly the identity of her grandfather, who might be the young psychologist or even the cold, possessive, lovelorn Uncle. However, the answer is more complex and surprising than either character at first imagined.
As a warning, the following section of the synopsis gives away important plot points: During Margaret's time at the hospital, she develops a close friendship with a beautiful and manipulative woman named Clea, who seems to have all the boldness, self-possession, and sexual energy Margaret desires for herself, but can't actualize. Clea has a dark secret. As a result of postpartum depression, she poisoned her husband and attempted to poison her newborn baby. In the final chapters of the novel, she and Margaret escape the hospital. While fleeing, she tells Margaret the truth about her past. When the women try to steal money from Margaret's home in order to leave town to find the orphaned daughter, Clea is shot dead by Margaret's Uncle.
In present day, Alice and Colby dig deeper until they meet characters from the past, most notably Amy Matthews, wife of the psychologist who treated Margaret. She gives them the last correspondence Margaret sent to Avery a year after Clea's death. In the letter, she admits to how she and her Uncle colluded in twisting their grief over her parents' deaths into a self-destructive fantasy, which in turn, led to her breakdown and violent reaction. The letter also reveals that, although Margaret raised Alice as her grandchild and Alice's mother as her child, Alice's mother was Clea's child. Clea was Alice's actual grandmother and the poisoned husband was her grandfather. Margaret found Clea's child and kept her as her own, finding peace by becoming what she lost years ago--a parent.
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