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The first thing you should know about “Idaho,” the shatteringly original debut by O. Henry Prize winner Emily Ruskovich, is that it upturns everything you think you know about story.
Ostensibly it’s a novel about a tragedy — young mother Jenny inexplicably kills her daughter May with a hatchet, while older daughter June vanishes into the woods. Refusing to explain her actions, Jenny is charged with murder and sent to prison.
Wade, her grief-stricken husband, is punishingly alone, struggling until he eventually marries Ann, the local piano teacher.
You might think that the primary focus of the book is going to be a business-as-usual exploration of why Jenny killed May, or where June is and how they find her. But this novel is much more interested in a deeper, more haunting meditation on love, loss, forgiveness, time and memory.
“Idaho” begins with Wade and Ann, married many years, their love tested by both the solitude of their environment and Wade’s increasing dementia, something he inherited from his father. They live in the fierce, snowy mountains of Idaho, and in many ways, Ann loves Wade more than he returns it, because she endures his fits of violence and his moments of disconnection.
Idaho
By Emily Ruskovich
Random House, $27
The more Wade disintegrates, the more Ann integrates. She’s determined to resurrect all of his memories, especially the ones about the tragedy, to remember his life for him, if she has to, because that might be the only thing to keep them bound together, and to keep him alive.
Engulfed in her husband’s past, her own present life changes. She begins to have memories from Wade’s little girls themselves, as if she is actually living part of their former lives. More and more, she’s determined not only to discover the truth about what happened but to find June, too, and not just for Wade, but for herself as well.
Ruskovich dips in and out of various points of view, quilting together everything known about that tragic day. We’re in young May’s head as she pines for her sister June’s attention. We take on the point of view of June, who is pulling away from her baby sister in an attempt to be her own person — no matter the cost. We hear from peripheral characters, like Eliot, a boy June knew, who had a tragic accident himself.
We hear, too from Jenny, silent and undemanding in prison, taking a writing class, but not for herself — instead handing in the work of her cellmate, Elizabeth, who has lost privileges and is desperate to write. Both women’s lives begin to slowly open up, and Elizabeth discovers that in the dark, unforgiving world of prison, she finds the friend she desperately needs.
Each character’s voice is real and authentic, rendered with hypnotic precision.
“Idaho’s” brilliance is in its ability to not to tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life — but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us. And to do that, Ruskovich reminds us, we need only have “hearts whole enough to know they can break.”
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