Book Review: The Blue Jar, by Marta Pelrine-Bacon

[Note: please be sure to read the disclosure at the foot of this review.]

Marta Pelrine-Bacon is a fan of the old Twin Peaks TV series; she has actually named one of her several online abodes Searching for Agent Dale Cooper (the FBI agent in the series, played by Kyle Maclachlan). In the promotional copy for her debut novel, The Blue Jar, her publisher says:

Fans of the quirky and off-beat will love this atmospheric, psychological tale of revenge and obsession with its unexpected twists and turns. Lake Belle, reminiscent of Twin Peaks set in the deep American South, provides the atmospheric setting for this thrilling psycho-drama with its underlying theme of weird justice.  Is it magic? Or is something else at work?

All of which pretty much lays it out there for anyone else familiar with the program — or its reputation, for that matter: expect the off-center.

So, how off-center is it? Let’s see…

The book’s point-of-view, generally, follows the activities and thoughts of two fifteen-year-old girls, Chesnie and Fran. We might, in many ways, imagine Chesnie to be the “protagonist”; her storyline opens the narrative, and of the two friends she’s certainly the more flamboyant — the one who seems to attract the attentions of both men and women, sometimes when she least hopes for it.

By the time I’d read to some midpoint in the book, though, I remembered that first impressions can be wrong. Fran is thoughtful, Chesnie impulsive; Fran is a good friend, Chesnie has good friends; Fran radiates uncertainty, Chesnie charges confidently (almost bull-in-a-china-shop style) into even the most explosive situations. Despite the horror of their shared experiences which drive the plot, Chesnie survives almost entirely by luck. (She seems to believe she deserves survival, even triumph.) Fran, on the other hand, rises above expectations — her own as well as others’ — by book’s end. While Chesnie may or may not be the protagonist, then, Fran is the obvious heroine.

In general shape, trying hard to avoid spoilers, here’s what happens in the course of the book:

• On the heels of nearly identical, horrific crimes of which they’re victims, Chesnie and Fran move out of their homes. They stay with Chesnie’s grandmother, Milla. She may or may not be — off-center, see? — a witch, although most of the characters believe her to be one. She is, however, certainly a magnet for and friend to girls in trouble.
• The storyline identifies two “villains,” both (as it happens) male. But a good number of second- and third-tier characters, of both sexes, are guilty of indecision, poor judgment, vanity, selfishness — all of whom, flawed as they are, contribute to the ongoing dangers the girls face.
• To be sure, you’ll also find here a handful of (yes) sometimes flawed people blessed with common sense, patience, even dignity. Importantly, these characters share these blessings with Chesnie or Fran (or both).

Pelrine-Bacon does most writerly things well, and some of them very well. She gives us the story straightforwardly, with little or none of the florid telling that can sink even the best writers. Stylistically, she often drops little grace notes of metaphor and phrasing (a good number of them inducing jealousy in at least one reader):

…[Fran] liked the idea of working magic. Maybe with the right focus and determination, there were powers she couldn’t see that could influence life, like scientists laboring over an experiment and coming upon the law of unintended consequences.

…the same clothes on Fran would have the innocent sexiness of a girl on a green lawn in front of a candy-colored, suburban house.

…Dew coated the darkness.

She inserts lines like these into the narrative almost casually, without pyrotechnic Look at me! buildup or elaboration. If you blink, you might overlook them. (Keeping readers from blinking is a shrewd strategy.)

At the same time, Pelrine-Bacon sometimes tells the story, well, indirectly — elliptically. Twin Peaks, famously, was littered with non sequiturs — some of which came back to haunt characters in later episodes (“The owls are not what they seem”), and some of which were never referenced again. But the practice is not common in most shows and not at all in novels, I think, and may make some readers restless. Much though I loved the show, I wasn’t expecting this in a novel, and I confess it took some getting used to.

But more importantly — once I relaxed and just trusted Pelrine-Bacon to get me “there,” wherever there might turn out to be — the story became very absorbing. The climactic scene, spanning several chapters, is masterful. It begins with a party — not a teen party, but an “adult” one which the girls attend. (The interface between teen and adult worlds constitutes, you might say, the book’s main setting.) The tension builds as they encounter not just one but both nemeses. And to say simply that this long scene peaks in a fortune-telling whorehouse does not begin to suggest the depth of human evil that brings them there. (Nor does it suggest, for that matter, the depth of human kindness which helps them survive the evil.)

Side note: boy, does Pelrine-Bacon like names. There’s Chesnie and Milla, obviously, but also a Scottie (a young woman), a Heath, a Jesse who goes by “Jes” (a nickname to which I myself am partial, for perhaps obvious reasons), a Tatiana who prefers to go by the name Tonya… Even Fran — short for “Francis” — likes to imagine herself a wilder, more confident alter ego: Francesca.

If I found one shortcoming in the book, it’s one which may (or may not) be attributable to its genre. As you probably know, Amazon assigns novels to more than one genre, starting with the general “Fiction,” say, and drilling down to finer and finer degrees of classification to make it easier to find its ideal audience (and vice-versa). The fully drilled-down list of categories for the Kindle edition of The Blue Jar looks like this (boldface emphasis added):

Teen & Young Adult > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Coming of Age

I don’t read much teen/YA fiction, but The Blue Jar seems about right for that age group. Still, coming to it as an adult reader, I was troubled by one thing: the author’s apparent backing off from “ick.” Consider an analogy — from Twin Peaks, even.

That series opens, almost right away, with a (fairly lingering) shot of what one reviewer described as something like “the deadest thing you’ll ever see on network television”: the corpse of a teenage girl, wrapped in plastic, which has washed up on the shoreline. After a protracted investigation by the FBI and local authorities, we finally learn about the evil forces and events which put Laura Palmer into that plastic wrapping — and yes, we learn who killed her. And we see what happens to the killer.

Whatever many loyal viewers thought of the specifics, I thought both that opening and that conclusion were generally just right: we had to see them.

Now imagine the same story in the form of a novel. It opens not with a fisherman on the river’s edge, discovering the girl’s body. No, it opens a week later: we find out that her body was discovered, but we don’t get an account of the discovery.

And then, at the climax, we don’t see what happens to the killer. Instead, someone tells us — after the fact — “s/he died.”

As I said, it may be that the genre constrains what The Blue Jar can “show” to younger readers. But I do look forward to seeing what Pelrine-Bacon (especially as a Twin Peaks fan) might produce for adult readers, given an equally horrific storyline. Her other obvious gifts as a storyteller, and as a writer, suggest that she can manage that feat, like all the others, quite nicely.

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Disclosure: Marta Pelrine-Bacon is a friend of mine. I read and we discussed brief passages of The Blue Jar a couple-three years ago, well before she started submitting it to the outside world. No doubt this familiarity has led me to grant her inadvertent kindnesses I wouldn’t grant to a stranger; still, I’ve watched out for that possibility, and tried not to let it get in the way of honesty (one way or the other). Feel free to factor in all that information in evaluating my remarks above. I have received and am receiving no remuneration for this review, and bought my own copy of the book when it was published. She knew I was writing it, but I did not discuss the review with her in advance.

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