Book Review: Readings

By Penny Van Horn

An American Outrage: A Novel of Quillifarkeag, Maine

Algonquin Books, 274 pp., $22.95

The troubles in Quillifarkeag, Maine, begin on an otherwise uneventful day when Joe DeLay drives his pickup truck out of his driveway at a high rate of speed. In his hasty departure, he accidentally traps his wife Ellen in the hard-sided plastic toolbox he keeps in the truck bed -- it seems she was cleaning it from the inside when the lid slammed shut and locked. The box is coffin-sized.

In the days Ellen lays undiscovered and trapped, things change between her and Joe. With her mind turning in upon itself in the cramped darkness, she convinces herself that Joe is trying to kill her -- it was not an accident, she surmises, but a slow and probably botched homicide. Meanwhile, in his near-empty house, Joe convinces himself that Ellen has left him for reasons he can't fathom, but his respect for Ellen is deep and abiding enough that he is certain she has good reasons. He decides he may have deserved to be abandoned. Ellen's best friend Wilma thinks the matter is nothing more than an unfortunate accident -- "It should have been funny," she says. But it isn't funny at all.

Over the course of time, Ellen retreats to an abandoned hunting camp where, one day, a stray bullet from her gun accidentally plinks a fisherman's pinky, severing it at the first joint. Before we know it, an ad hoc posse of four police officers has gunned Ellen down at her front door leaving the town scratching their heads about just how in the world such a thing has happened.

And so it is in An American Outrage, G.K. Wuori's debut novel which takes its cues (as did Nude in Tub, his collection of Quillifarkeag short stories from 1999) from the odd behavior that thrives in remote rural communities far removed from the civilizing glare of urban culture. Wuori might try to claim that the citizens of Quilli (as the locals call it) are "neither more nor less goofy than those in the big cities." But by tattooing its citizens with names like Poison Gorelick and Pissy Philomene, he seems to announce that they inhabit that odd, unvisited place down a road that few of us travel. For all its apparent uniqueness, Quilli makes no claim to being special or even clever -- witness Joe's handyman business which boasts no better name than "Things That Need to Be Done."

Wuori is possessed of an imagination as fertile as the dark, shaded soil of the Maine woods, an imagination filled with the sweet smell of decayed and dying things. An American Outrage is brutally ironic without smirking and perversely funny without being mean. But events don't proceed in a tidy fashion; things seem to happen with the disorderly thump and bump of a bowling pin clattering down a staircase. The goings-on only come into focus after the fact, when retold by Wuori's narrator -- Splotenbrun "Splotchy" Doll. Even with the benefit of hindsight, the participants can't seem to agree on the causes or meanings of the lives and deaths around them.

Aside from its merits as wonderful fiction, Wuori's Quillifarkeag opens a fascinating window onto a world that is hidden in plain sight and rarely written about -- the multiethnic New England blend of Acadians and Mic Mac Indians and a variety of other nationalities. The stubborn rural mannerisms they embody are the very mold for the stereotype of a taciturn Down Easter.

In the end, An American Outrage turns out to be, very simply, the postmortem of a marriage that died prematurely and undeservedly. Joe should have heard the toolbox lid slam. Ellen should have known it was an accident. Their simple, unvarnished happiness should have gone on until they were old and gray. There should have been no shots fired and no blood spilled. But life is messy. G.K. Wuori has patiently autopsied the remains of a marital union, but the cause of death is beyond our ken.