Readings

The Deadwood Beetle

by Mylène Dressler

BlueHen, 240 pp., $23.95

One man’s guilty conscience is another man’s terminal illness, and Dr. Tristan Martens, a recently retired entymology professor in New York specializing in beetles, is dying one hell of a slow death. The Deadwood Beetle opens with his discovery of a battered worktable in Cora Lowenstein’s Chelsea antiques shop, its underside inscribed in Dutch with “When the Jews are gone, it will be our turn.” While Cora takes this message as “Clear and honest. A child’s warning,” only Tristan knows the true history of the table, knows it was his mother’s, knows his older sister penciled in that inscription, knows his family were Nazi sympathizers in the Netherlands. But the table isn’t for sale, and though he was only a child during the Nazi occupation of his country, Tristan’s unbearable guilt manifests itself in the blackened pinewood relic. His clumsy attempt to retrieve it from Cora swells into a story of misguided love and, ultimately, misdealt destiny. “I had the sensation of wood rocking underneath me,” Tristan narrates early on, in his cramped apartment. “Something had to be done. Because a sleight of hand was being performed. A lie. A meandering, hapless lie, maybe. Unspoken crimes had been committed, nonetheless.”

Something is done, of course, but more by Dressler, who lives in Houston and is a 2001 Dobie Paisano Fellow, than her sixtysomething protagonist. The Deadwood Beetle is a work of sure-handed contemporary wonder, a graceful fiction that gains momentum by the sentence. Her portrayal of Tristan as “a ghost carrying all his possessions,” as Cora calls him, struggling to accept his past — a past that includes a wife who has left him and a troubled but born-again son living in Texas who accuses him via e-mail of “EMOTIONAL ABSENCE” and “GODLESSNESS AND FAITHLESSNESS” — recalls Martha Cooley’s feats in her restrained but remarkable The Archivist (1998). Dressler’s dialogue, especially between Tristan and Cora, is beautifully unaffected; her short, almost elliptical chapters are littered with flashbacks and limping with regret. “There are points so unexpectedly lowering in one’s life that glancing up again the world looks as strange as a foreign and mountainous country,” Tristan tells us. Watching him navigate that country is an unexpected pleasure all the same.

This article appears in August 31 • 2001.