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The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended)
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Life Goes On Ann Packer’s first novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, provides a masterpiece of emotional tension and conflict in relationships among characters that become both transformed and fully themselves on the 350 pages of this book. If there’s one debut novel you decide to read this year, make it The Dive From Clausen’s Pier. Protagonist Carrie Bell begins the annual Memorial Day trip to Clausen’s Pier with growing doubts about the wisdom of marrying her fiancé, Mike Mayer, her high school and college boyfriend. Having lived in Madison, Wisconsin her whole life, Carrie feels confined and defined by the place. Within the first few pages of the book, Carrie, Mike and another couple arrive at Clausen’s Pier, and Mike dives into the shallow water and ends up quadriplegic. The remaining 100+ pages of the first section of the book, “Intensive Care,” brings a reader into the grief and guilt Carrie feels, and her awareness that everything has changed. Packed with emotion, Carrie is caught between what she does for others and what she needs to do for herself. No one else knows that her love for Mike had gone away before the dive, and everyone expects her allegiance to Mike to be a key element of his rehabilitation therapy. By the end of this section, Carrie gets in her car and leaves town. The second section, “1000 Miles,” brings Carrie to New York City and Packer uses great skill to present both the naiveté of a newcomer and the vibrancy, ambition, pretensions and cost of life in New York. Carrie expands her identity in the city and enters a powerful love affair with a character named Kilroy, about whom Packer could have written another 300 pages. The final section, “Kilroy Was Here,” takes Carrie back to Madison. Here’s an excerpt from the second section, when Carrie goes to an art gallery opening in New York with high school classmate, Simon, in whose brownstone apartment she’s taken refuge: “”At 19^th Street we waited for the light and then crossed. The urgent rumble of a subway train rose through the sidewalk grates, and I realized I was getting used to New York: when I’d first arrived that sound had spooked me. The gallery was in a storefront on 16^th Street. At the door a guy about our age – tall and skinny-pale, with a shaved head – glanced idly but surely at everyone who entered. ‘An art-world bouncer,’ Simon whispered as we waited to go in. ‘Beware his deadly look of contempt.’ Inside, a few dozen people milled around under hot track lights, not paying much attention to the pictures. They were photographs, of chairs: kitchen chairs, armchairs, lawn chairs. All in black and white, all composed so the chair was alone in the frame and empty. We moved along one wall, studied a picture of a bentwood chair with a cane seat, another of a worn-out velvet armchair with a matching ottoman, its nap rubbed away. ‘These are great, don’t you think?’ Simon said. ‘It’s like they’re waiting for something.’ I liked them, too – how they conjured up rooms, whole worlds – but I couldn’t help thinking of the rehab poster back in Madison, the wheelchair casting its net of shadow onto the polished wood floor. GET MOVING. A couple came up behind us and I looked over my shoulder at them. The woman was tiny, with masses of curly dark hair; she wore a wine-colored dress that looked as if it were made of crumpled paper. Her companion was a tall, ponytailed man wearing a black cashmere sweater tucked into voluminously pleated black wool pants. He said to her, ‘There’s an interesting decontextualization going on, don’t you think?’ He extended his finger and outlined the shape of the chair. ‘It’s about forms and negative space – she’s taken the chairness away from the chair and left it purely object.’ Simon dug his elbow into my side, then grabbed me and pulled me across the room. ‘Don’t you love New York?’ he said. ‘You hear the best things.’ He shrugged off his jacket and glanced around. ‘How do you take the chairness away from a chair?’ ‘You must hae to do it in stages,’ I said. ‘First take the seatness away from the seat and move on from there.’” Packer delivers characters, scenes, and dialogue with precision. Before long, a reader knows the characters well, and looks forward to finding out what they do next. There are times when you want to take a breath from reading what’s on the page. You’ll enjoy turning the pages of The Dive at Clausen’s Pier, and by the end, you’ll miss Carrie and her friends. Like me, you’ll look forward to the next offering from Ann Packer. Steve Hopkins, June 19, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2002 issue of Executive Times Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com