FLESH WOUNDS
By Mick Cochrane
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 274 pages, $21.95
Halfway through this bittersweet first novel, Hal Lamm drives along a wintry Minneapolis street listening to Frank Sinatra. Hal, a successful salesman of manufactured memorabilia, recently pleaded guilty to sexually molesting his adolescent granddaughter Becky and was ordered to get treatment, pay a fine and stay away from his female grandchildren until they are 18. More benumbed than shamed, he drives along feeling “snug and secure” behind the wheel and reminisces about seeing Sinatra in his prime. Captured perfectly here is a picture of America as Mick Cochrane sees it: a place where people lament that things aren’t the way they used to be–when, in fact, things have never been the way they seem. Sinatra’s golden voice may have faded, but the man was never the soul-deep romantic we continue to pretend he is. We accept the illusion even as we believe it’s the facade for a callous lothario; oh, he’s an artist, we say. We motor along, like Hal, succumbing to the pervasiveness of vice, the ease of denial and justification.
So it is that, at first, Hal’s admission appears to have stunningly little impact on his life. Only gradually do the bonds linking Hal; his passive, estranged wife; and his four grown children begin to falter
and crack, like the beams of an old house weakened by an earthquake. But when the house comes down, it does so swiftly and in unpredictable ways, and what sets the collapse in motion is not so much Hal’s arrest as it is his daughter Ellie’s disclosure to the police that she, too, was accosted by her father.
Until now, each of the children has lived by a plan that thwarts all messy dealings with intimacy or anger. Maureen maintains a distant attachment to her ex-husband, a middle-age adolescent rock musician with whom she had two children. (Almost too aptly, Maureen works as a hairdresser, your classic cover-up-the-warts profession. She even cuts her father’s hair.)
Geoff, the most like his father, grooms his own illusions through the high-tech luxury prosperity can buy; Becky, his daughter, flirts with eating disorders and loathes the sterile life her family leads. ” `Dad tells people he built it,’ ” she says to her therapist, describing their new house, ” `but he can’t even hammer a nail straight.’ . . . Even the lawn was brand new, having arrived one morning in a flat-bed truck, rolls and rolls of vivid green sod unfurled and stamped in place by two shirtless men in just a few hours.”
Calvin’s voodoo takes the form of doing everything the way he imagines his father wouldn’t: “stay home, don’t fool around, don’t get hooked on television, keep the attic clean.” But, on the verge of becoming a father himself, Calvin is about to find out–as Ellie already has–how parenthood makes a sham of your defenses, leaving you fearful of what might replace them.
Ellie is the only child to distance herself from home geographically. Living in Buffalo, she works in the orderly field of graphic design, compulsively restores old furniture and is married to (and vaguely bored with) Walt, a paramedic whose loyalty and gentle silences give as much healing protection to his wife as his work gives to the people he rescues.
Now, like their father, each sibling has an ordeal to face or deny, and the variety of choices they make is realized with wonderful humanity and humor. Indeed, without Cochrane’s innate compassion it would be impossible to tolerate what Hal’s wife, Phyllis, confronts–for how much redemption awaits a woman who exposed her children to such violation? In a scene that is masterful for its jolt from nostalgia to mortification, Phyllis catches a first true glimpse of her own complicity as, shopping for a shower gift, she considers a baby blanket:
“It was Geoff, she thought, who later wore his little blanket draped over his shoulder as Superman’s cape, and Ellie who slept with hers until it was a frayed and knotted rag. She held one to her face. It was impossible, she knew, but it smelled like a baby. They came in white, blue, and pink. And then it hit her. If Calvin and Kate had a girl, Hal would not be allowed to see her. . . . Her stomach sunk with the weight of so many more excuses, so many more lies, so much more knowing silence.”
Appropriately, there is a Kodacolor virtuosity to the narrative, a democratic point of view, a straightforward, fluid style, a conventional unfolding of events (from Hal’s temporary flight to Phyllis’ breakdown to the christening party for Calvin’s child); and there is an underlying acceptance that whether we like it or not, family is as inescapable as gravity. In this wholesome way, Cochrane does what any writer would envy: He tells a hard story and makes it look easy.
In looking at harsh truths through assertively hopeful eyes, he re-embraces the kind of heartland sensibility that writers from Raymond Carver to the Coen brothers have upended. Terrible things do happen, Cochrane tells us, but deserts are just, and the moral center does more than hold; it exerts a centrifugal force. There is something brave and likable about this perspective, even during the brief moments when it feels naive. Those moments occur toward the end of the novel, when its richly delicate emotions are threatened by some surprisingly heavy (and literal) pyrotechnics: a fire and a terminal disease. But once the drama is complete, “Flesh Wounds” lingers in the mind as a beautiful story, searing yet tender, that maps anew the shifting terrain of love.
