Out of prison, holding on to a fragile new life
A Hole in the Universe
By Mary McGarry Morris
Viking, 376 pp., $24.95
Mary McGarry Morris likes to put her characters in a predicament and let them run. Most novelists do this -- certainly most fiction can be viewed from this perspective -- but rarely with Morris's clarity of vision.
And clarity is crucial, because in ''A Hole in the Universe," as in Morris's four previous novels, the predicament is intricate and surprising. The novel's structure reminds me of the voluminous black overcoat worn by a man I knew 20 years ago in Communist Warsaw. We called him Stanislaus the Shifty; his profession was smuggling, and he took his wares all over the Eastern Bloc by train. When he opened his coat, the lining was all pockets, some of which in turn concealed other pockets, all of them filled with precious goods from the West.
When ''A Hole in the Universe" opens, we meet Gordon Loomis on his release from prison, where he's just finished serving a 25-year sentence for murder. It takes the first third or so of this old-fashioned page-turner to discover the who, when, where, and how of Gordon's crime. A young and pregnant wife, Janine Walters, was smothered in her bed when two high school seniors, Gordon and his bad-seed friend Jerry Cox, broke into what they thought was an empty house. The why of the crime remains a mystery, both to Gordon and to us, right through to the novel's end; indeed, it's never clear that the pillow Gordon placed over Janine's face was actually what killed her and her unborn baby. Jerry -- dead when the novel opens, of suicide -- went back to the house later that night and may have been the one responsible for the deaths.
But this loophole isn't what makes us sympathize with, and eventually come to like, Gordon. Morris's clear vision opens him to us. We discover what it feels like to have committed a terrible and irreversible act; to be catapulted into the rush and noise and irrelevance of ordinary life after a quarter of a century outside it; to find transforming joy in the simplest things. ''The lowering sun was still warm on his back. A fat bee buzzed drowsily near his face. He had worked the last six hours a free man. He could do whatever he felt like, go wherever he wanted, could feel it pulse in his fingertips, the soles of his feet, electrifying, the shock of living, of just being here." It is not only the past that separates this protagonist from the people around him; it's the present. He lives, in effect, on a different plane.
Poor Gordon! At 6 feet tall and 350 pounds, he cannot hope to blend in; even his shyness has ''a brooding force." But Gordon's predicament goes deeper than his threatening appearance, his isolation, or even his crime. It's his innocence that sets him on a collision course with everyone else in the novel. There's his ultra-respectable younger brother, Dennis, a dental surgeon bent on rehabilitating him; his neighbor, old Mrs. Jukas, understandably suspicious of him but continually requesting his help; a high school classmate, Delores Dufault, who visited Gordon in jail every month for 25 years and now, to his dismay, feels entitled to intimacy; 13-year-old Jada Fossum, who lives with her pregnant crack-addict mother across the street, deals drugs for a local lowlife named Ronnie Feaster, and tries to persuade Gordon to adopt her. Gordon lives in their midst as a kind of secular saint, in constant awareness of his past transgression. Though he doesn't know how, he longs to do penance. ''What price had he paid? Two lives were lost, yet he still had his. The emptiness and the lost years could not have been the true punishment."
In the world of Morris's fiction, suffering never leads directly to compassion. Gordon's unremitting acceptance of guilt gives him a merciless eye for the transgressions of those around him. Like the child who points out the emperor's nakedness, he lays bare their ugly secrets: his brother's extramarital affair, his boss's attempt to set fire to his grocery store for the insurance money, Delores's exploitative romantic ambitions. Pockets within pockets.
Because Morris tells the story from other characters' points of view as well as from Gordon's, we have a larger view. If this occasionally slows the story's progress, or pounds home a point already made -- if the exchanges between characters are sometimes repetitive and their names invite us to pigeonhole them -- well, the same could be said of Dickens. The payoff is an enlargement of feeling. Having already encompassed a convicted murderer, our sympathies stretch to accommodate a self-satisfied dentist, a woman driven by all-devouring love, even a drug dealer. (Who wouldn't feel for scrawny young Jada, with her ''glass-bright, too easily shattered voice . . . held together by lies and hope"?)
We come to feel afraid for Gordon, caught up in this maelstrom of need and desire and believing that ''not even execution or suicide could plug the hole he had made in the universe." It would be unfair to reveal more. This novel is such a pleasure that you'll want to open all those pockets for yourself.
Ann Harleman is the author of a story collection, ''Happiness," and a novel, ''Bitter Lake." She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.
