FICTION
“Quiet Dell”
Jayne Anne Phillips
Scribner, $28, 480 pages
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” The quote is from Emily Dickinson, and describes how many people felt in 1979 after reading the short stories in Jayne Anne Phillips’ first book, “Black Tickets.” The collection, stylistically closer to poetry than fiction, was universally recognized as evidence of early genius.
With titles like “Lechery” and “Stripper,” each story delivered a raw, uncut look at drug addiction, runaways, child prostitution, sexual abuse and pedophiles. Though many ran no longer than a couple of pages and none over 20, these were dark tickets indeed. Reading them was like brushing up against a live wire: shocking, transfixing.
Embedded in some of the longer pieces were more mainstream themes, ones Phillips would go on to tackle in novels: family ties, memory, the vulnerability of children, the impact of war, motherhood.
And though there would be a trace amount of “Black Tickets” in everything Philips wrote from then on — “Machine Dreams,” “Shelter,” “MotherKind,” “Lark and Termite” — never again would her work qualify as “dirty realism.” Good always triumphed in the end.
The subject matter of her fifth novel, “Quiet Dell,” leaves no doubt that the story won’t end well. In the early 1930s, a man named Harry Powers used the Lonely Hearts columns to correspond with dozens of women he then conned out of their life savings. Afterwards, Powers vanished. Sometimes his victims did as well.
Asta Eicher, a middle-aged widow who agreed to marry him, was his undoing. Her body, those of her three children, and another woman Powers had similarly courted, were found in a ditch next to Powers’ garage in Quiet Dell, West Virginia. Beneath the garage, police found a soundproofed chamber of horrors.
The case and trial made national headlines. Thousands of spectators flocked to the scene in the summer of 1931, and Phillips’ mother was one of them. The tales she told of filing by the “murder garage” while souvenir hunters tore it apart for trophies, left a lasting impression on Phillips, who says she has wanted to write the book for years.
But rather than focus on Powers or his grisly murders, Phillips wanted to concentrate on his victims, to “write a novel whose beauty and depth might transcend the darkness of the story.”
The result is a hypnotic web of impending danger woven from fact and fiction, including newspaper reports, letters, trial records, court documents and photographs. We first meet the doomed Eicher family — Asta, her son and two daughters — about six months before their deaths, in narratives seen through the eyes of both real-life and wholly invented characters.
Because we know in advance what’s to come when Asta reads her genteel letters from Powers, this first section is all the more affecting — especially the description by the youngest Eicher, 9-year-old Annabel, of her family’s last, joyous Christmas together.
To follow Powers’ arrest, investigation and trial, Phillips creates Emily Thornhill, a Chicago reporter assigned to get “the woman’s angle on hard news.” Though she presents herself as “a supremely confident professional,” Emily is easily affected and overly trusting. During her first visit to the Eicher home, she adopts their dog, feels an immediate kinship with the late Annabel, and, within minutes of meeting the family’s banker, William Malone, falls deeply in love with him.
Her hyper-sensitivity also applies to Powers and his crimes. Indeed, Emily has only to see and touch personal items, stand in certain spots or interview Powers’ relatives, to have visions of the crimes. Her vivid hunches even extend to Powers’ childhood, and she knows what he once did to “birds, young kittens, his [mother’s] small dog.”
Powers makes his appearance early on, but only long enough for us to register the sinister combination of polite urgency and impending madness that accompanies his abduction of Asta’s children.
We’ll catch glimpses of him during the murders — “dark, hunched and wet … a ragged, fattened wolf“ — through Annabel, whose spirit observes and remembers from beyond the grave, in flickering images all the more terrifying for being seen through a child’s eyes.
Phillips builds the remainder of the book around Emily, whose life begins to resemble the one stolen from Asta and her children — she even adopts an orphan the same age as the Eicher boy. Dream sequences and Annabel’s kaleidoscopic consciousness provide some of the novel’s most convincing, evocative moments.
Yet the unwavering focus on transcendence and redemption calls to mind the way fairy tales, once savage and full of hard truths, have been censored, sanitized and sweetened up with morals and happy endings. The few times Powers materialized to do harm — blandly poisonous, “his blood singing” — made me wish Phillips had used that particular black ticket for a deeper journey into the realm of darkness she navigates so well.
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