A family story with an edgy geopolitical angle

FICTION
Novels about mothers and the inevitable conflicts and disappointments with their offspring are often tiresomely sentimental. That’s not so with Valerie Martin’s latest novel, “Trespass,” in which the story of three women protagonists is complicated by an edgy geopolitical twist.
The story begins quietly, suggesting a genteel, even bucolic domestic tale of a mother, Chloe Dale, adjusting to Salome, the fellow college student her only son Toby, studying in New York, wants to marry. Chloe is an artist who is currently illustrating a new edition of “Wuthering Heights.” She lives with husband Brendan, a historian, in the country outside New York.
Toby has been a good son, the family has been close, and they enjoy their old rambling house, surrounded by woods and fields. But Chloe is uneasy: a poacher, whose gunshots she hears while working in her studio, worries her; the current political situation depresses her; and Salome, a Croatian refugee whose family now lives in Louisiana, seems an unsuitable wife for Toby.
It is soon apparent that their tranquil lives will change — there’s no clumsy foreshadowing, for Martin is too much the professional, but merely life’s own implacable will at work. A parallel narrative set in Croatia, where a nameless and unhappily married woman begins an affair with a member of the hated militia, soon suggests darker complexities. Salome has been told that her mother is dead, but her angry brother suggests that the truth, rooted in the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, is more dishonorable.
To Chloe’s further dismay, Salome is soon pregnant, and the couple get married. Martin is especially adept at describing the age-old fears of mothers of sons. Sitting at breakfast after Salome has left the room, Chloe “has a sense that this moment alone with her son is the last one she will ever have. Surely this is paranoia. It is only that such moments will constitute the nature of their time together from now on; it will be time snatched from Salome.”
Salome’s search for the truth about her mother, which takes her and Toby to Europe, becomes a somber reminder not only of the recent violence in Croatia but also of the havoc unhappy marriages can cause.
Though the European scenes sometimes seem strained, there are no winners when heart and history collide, and Martin perceptively describes these troubling realities in a novel that celebrates truth rather than wishful thinking. Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.

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