Indeed, Knight offers none of the standard, tired explanations--boring
routines, lack of communication, etc.--to explain Delia's affair
with her next-door neighbor.
She studied her husband around the house, watched him shaving
for work, considered the way he brought a fork to his lips at
dinner, looking for evidence of discontent in herself, but she
couldn't find anything. She loved her husband, she was sure.
He still stirred an affection in her and passion, comfortable
and kindhearted though it might have been. But she could walk
him to the door when he left for the college, watch his car turn
the corner, then slip across the driveway, her heart already
thumping in dangerous anticipation, with only an occasional fluttering
of remorse. It was as if she were two separate women, capable
of two separate sets of emotions. She imagined that she changed
shape, like in the movies, just before Simon opened the door.
When she passed a mirror in his house, she half-expected to see
an unfamiliar reflection in the glass.
For his part, Bell, who lives alone in the house he inherited
from his parents, isn't unaware of the moral transgression posed
by the affair. He had, after all, grown up next door to Sam Holladay
and even cut his grass occasionally as a teenager. (Knight adds
a nice Freudian twist: Bell believes his mother may have had
an affair when he was a child, and he wonders "if the man
who had stolen my mother for a little while, assuming that there
was such a man, was anything like me.") But he's lonely
in the way that existentialists talk about the loneliness of
souls that can't touch, and like many rather morbid individuals
suffering existential angst, Bell decides the chance to bridge
the gap between souls overrides moral codes. It's certainly not
mere sex that drives the relationship: it's the chance to know
yourself through understanding another person that brings them
together. That mirror image in the passage quoted above is significant,
I think, because so much of the book is taken up with this matter
of finding your identity through external observation.
Knight has a strong eye as a writer (some of his imagery is breathtaking),
and his mastery of a somewhat experimental form is astonishing,
given his relative youth. Bell narrates many of the chapters
himself (the others are kept in the third person, although we're
able to hear both Delia and Holladay's thoughts), and the story
is told out of sequence with a wonderful associative rhythm linking
them together. By telling us up front Bell will be killed for
his transgressions (the opening chapter is appropriately called
"How It Ended"), Knight casts a sense of fatalism to
his story. The novel itself, Knight suggests, is a 'divining
rod' showing us "Tiny particles of intent, passing invisibly,
delicately, from the rod into its bearer, leading him toward
his intended destination."
But Divining Rod is no mere exercise in style. Knight
shows great insight into his characters, and he puts his skills
to good use by letting us feel the suddenness and unexpectedness
with which his characters discover things about themselves. When
Holladay meets Delia's mother forty years after promising himself
never to marry--enough years to have forgotten an idle, youthful
thought--it comes back to him suddenly:
Right at that moment, he thought of Mary Youngblood. Standing
in the open doorway of Delia's mother's house, crickets ringing
in the yard behind him like sleigh bells, he remembered the way
her lips had felt against his hair and that she had forgotten
her mitten and had been too embarrassed to retrieve it because
she had ended things between them the next day. He remembered,
as well, the decision he had made--the sort of decision that
only a young man could make, sure of the future and foolish with
conceit--never to love another woman as long as he lived. He
smiled at Delia's mother and felt a sudden, sad surprise that
he had kept his promise to himself for so long. He hadn't done
it deliberately. He'd forgotten it, in fact, with other women,
at other times.
It's our gaining this insight at the same moment Holladay
does that makes Knight's work seem electric at times. Again and
again, Knight turns things suddenly, exposing both the reader
and his characters simultaneously to wonderful transformative
moments. Even something as simple as a neighbor saying good night
to Simon Bell is ripe with potential: "And he said, 'Good
night, Simon. Sleep well,' his voice different all of a sudden,
tender and settling, a voice accustomed to soothing nightmares."
That we believe a man who had just been describing sex games
can transform so suddenly (in a single sentence, no less) and
suggest a soothing, paternal calm for Simon (a perpetually needy,
lonely child) is a sign of how great Knight's skills are as a
writer, and the intelligence he has in putting them to deep,
thematic use.
Divining Rod is a fast, astonishingly intelligent novel,
and Knight is certain to become an important voice in American
fiction.
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