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You don't have to read very far in Vinita Hampton Wright's new novel, Dwelling Places, to conclude that all is not well. In the first six pages we learn that the patriarch of the Barnes family is dead, that the farm is "long since gone," that Mack, the elder and only surviving Barnes son, is wrapping up a stay at a mental hospital. Not to mention that widow Barnes's car seems to be on its last legs—just another stress in an already heavily burdened life.
Dwelling Places
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The Barnes family of Beulah, Iowa, has been battered by the farm crisis of the late-20th-century. Taylor Barnes died a decade before the novel opens, in a farming accident that may not have been so accidental, after all. His younger son Alex was forced to sell his farm for a pittance, and subsequently drank himself to death. Mack realized he had to get out of farming, too, and he and his wife now work in town, though they still live, with their two teenage children, in the old family farmhouse. The unexplored grief of giving up a beloved way of life has taken its toll on Mack, and he has been sunk in a great, gray depression. Only his wife, heroic, strong Jodie, with the loving and occasionally co-dependent help of her mother-in-law Rita, is holding the family together.
Jodie, of course, is not as heroic and strong as she appears. Indeed, the subtleties of her character are the narrative and psychological strength of the book. She does hold the family together, but she begins to lose herself in the process. In the chaos of work at the school cafeteria, tending to the needs of her kids (one's gone Goth; the other has immersed herself in the youth group at the Baptist church), trying to reach her husband, making sure the bills are paid—in the midst of all this, she notices that she's attracted to a co-worker, a teacher named Terry Jenkins. And she notices he's attracted back, and that his attentions and the attendant frisson feel good. After a little requisite hand-wringing—"This is a bad idea. A really bad idea," she tells herself—Jodie gives herself over to the "lawless pleasure" of an affair.
Wright's growth as a novelist has been exciting to watch. Her first novel, Grace at Bender Springs (1999), took readers to a Kansas town suffering through both literal and spiritual drought. The novel was edgier, a little less pat than most novels published by Christian houses. As Publishers Weekly reported, "Grace at Bender Springs had made it through the entire editorial process at Christian publishing house Multnomah and was ready to go to the printer when the company's executives decided at the 11th hour to pull the plug. Although the novel contained no foul language or explicit sex scenes, its realistic characters and dark tone made it a risk for the Christian market." The novel was picked up by Broadman & Holman and published to critical acclaim.
A year later, Broadman & Holman brought out Wright's second novel, Velma Still Cooks in Leeway. One of many small-town Christian novels that came out that year, Velma departed from the familiar trajectory in which the culmination of the novel is someone's conversion. Velma, by contrast, explored a community of good Christian folk grappling with real sin—in this case, rape and domestic abuse—in their midst.
As Velma Still Cooks in Leeway moved beyond the conventional conversion plot to the story of life after the altar call, so Dwelling Places eschews the traditional marriage plot, in which anxious courtship moves the novel forward and everything comes to a happy conclusion when the protagonists tie the knot. Dwelling Places is a story of what happens after—way after—the wedding day. The town in which Wright has set her story is aptly named: Beulah means "married," and at the heart of this novel is the story of what happens in the belly of a loving, strained, frayed, tested marriage.
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