Gabriel's Eye: A Novel

By Penny Van Horn

Gabriel's Eye

Winedale Publishing, 352 pp., $25

In Gabriel's Eye, Texas writer C.W. Smith goes all Law & Order on us, with a story ripped from today's headlines: Female Teacher Sleeps With High School Student! The consequences are, as they must be, tragic. But Smith, who teaches creative writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and is the author of Thin Men of Haddam among other novels, has more in mind than tabloid tales. His title refers to the Annunciation, when Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary to let her know she was to bear the Messiah. But why, Smith wonders, if God were so certain of Mary's complacent obedience, did he feel the need to send a beautiful young angel to sell her on the project?

Smith, stepping out of the fictional framework for a moment as he occasionally does, calls the Annunciation "a moment when a small and anonymous individual whose life is the same size as everyone else's suddenly steps onto the public stage of history because of an act of heroism, a heinous crime, or mortal sin." He clearly intends the same weight for this story. Toward the end of this book he begins to succeed, but he struggles along the way.

The story is set in Dallas during the 1980s, a perhaps unbeaten place-and-time one-two punch of American cultural superficiality. The novel moves in and out of the thoughts of various characters: Susan, a 28-year-old high school art teacher in a stalled relationship with Curt, a frat boy going to seed; and Jeff, a 17-year-old senior, who lives with his manic-depressive mother, a fundamentalist Christian. The technique aims at tour de force -- a male writer inhabiting the consciousnesses of a lovely young woman, a teenage boy, his fretful mother -- but the carefully delineated "he thought/she thought" technique plods a bit early on.

A bigger problem is making sense of the protagonist, Susan, who doesn't quite add up. For someone of her supposed sensitivity and intelligence -- she is writing a master's thesis on representations of the Annunciation in Renaissance art -- the shallowness of her self-understanding is simply incredible. This is not to say that intelligent people cannot live in denial. But Susan's river in Egypt flows at permanent flood tide.

At point after point in the narrative Susan manages to deny her feelings for Jeff. Posing for him in a bathing suit? Carefully showering and changing into sexier clothes before his art lesson? Does anything signal to this (highly introspective) character that something might be wrong in her attitude toward her student? No. And while she remains blandly un-self-aware, every one of these actions is a sort of elbow in the reader's increasingly bruised ribs. It begins to seem like a kind of condescension to the character, which is death to this kind of story.

Susan's boyfriend Curt, the ex-fraternity "dude" (one of his favorite words), fares even worse. After seeing Dick Tracy, "Curt thinks about wearing a fedora. Nah. After 'Indiana Jones' made that safari-styled hat hip to wear, he got one, wore it a half-dozen times. He was always having to double back to retrieve it from a restaurant booth, a movie seat." Poor loser Curt, getting fashion trends from Hollywood movies! But if you're going to traffic in pop culture, it's important to know your way around -- Indy wore a fedora, too.

Smith does better with the 17-year-old, perhaps because most of us see adolescence, with its profound passions, narcissism, and ignorance, from a tender distance. But surprisingly, it is Jeff's sad mother who gets the clearest, least patronizing treatment. Seen by other characters, she is a basket case; but revealed by her own thoughts she's a weary but clear-seeing woman doing her best in wretched circumstances. Had all the characters been this rich and surprising, the book would have better earned its genuinely poignant conclusion.