An exquisite first chapter draws you into Cheryl Strayed’s new novel, “Torch,” about grief’s effect on a small family in a small town. Nothing could be more ordinary than death, and nothing more ripping.
Teresa Rae Wood is a woman who, while in her teens, was choked, battered and nearly killed by her first husband. She somehow survived to blossom, raise two children and pass her wicker baskets of wisdom on to anyone who will listen. She is small and stubborn, a health nut who smokes an occasional joint if offered. She’s our heroine, whose life, while quickly stilled, is the pulsing center of the book.
She makes the decision to leave her husband, despite his threats and anger, because she wants to be a good example to her children, Joshua and Claire. A relative tells her of a job in Minnesota. She and the kids take a suitcase and pillow each and leave Pennsylvania on a bus. Days later, they alight in the town of Midden, in Coltrap County, right on the Mississippi, population 408.
People are good to them; Teresa gets a job at the Rest-A-While Villa cleaning up after mostly Norwegian old folks who can’t take care of themselves. They live over a bar/restaurant in one room with sunshine and good baking smells and easy access to the river. Although she has sworn off men and sex, she does have a few boyfriends and then “a long spell of nothing.” She is 27, hungry for something, and catches the eye of carpenter Bruce Gunther, who is visiting his Aunt Jenny at the rest home. His name, she thought, “was like a cure that had taken her a century to find.”
Wary, she takes time to fall in love before she lets Bruce meet the kids. When he is finally invited for dinner, he courts them with his good heart and soon they are besotted. Not much later, the four of them compose a nonlegal ceremony that involves releasing small branches into the river. Teresa and Bruce have about 11 years of ordinary happiness with the ups and downs of coupledom and the challenges of raising children. They take quiet, peaceful comfort in each other.
Teresa develops a local radio show called “Modern Pioneers” that mortifies her growing children. She interviews people who talk about folk wisdom, herbs and potions and natural remedies for insomnia and the like.
Once her kids gloried in all her folksy ways, but as they get older, they are embarrassed when she mentions them on her show. They scoff when she translates what animals are thinking. Her spirit is unstoppable, until it does stop.
Teresa thought it was like her spine was a zipper and that someone came up behind her, unzipped her spine and pushed his hands into her organs as if they were “grapes to be smashed for wine.” Sometimes the feeling is sharp, like diamonds or shards of glass. Her doctor tells her she is really healthy, except for the cancer along her spine, “growing like wildfire,” that will kill her very soon.
Daughter Claire comes home from college and never goes back. Son Joshua cuts class, walks out of detention, then leaves school altogether.
Beloved husband Bruce decides he will kill himself when she dies; he can’t imagine the pain of losing Teresa. The logical way out, he thinks, is to hang himself near the river. But first he would send a note to the sheriff so the kids won’t find him.
Teresa dies about a third of the way into the book, and that’s when it starts to dilute and falter. The family is in disarray, and there isn’t a strong thread to carry the reader along.
As with grief, though, after the disbelief, the anger and all the diversions, there is a certain acceptance at the end and some occurrences that you’re happy to see for the family Teresa loved.
Diane Hartman is a principal in Hartman & Brown, a media consulting firm.
Torch
By Cheryl Strayed
Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $24
