By Heather Mackey
Sometimes it’s hard to call a book “promising,” with all that the word connotes of amiability. Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon’s debut novel Nothing is as promising as a rattlesnake.
Set in and around Missoula, Montana, Nothing follows a mix of combustible and disillusioned characters who flail and drink and hurt each other while wildfire slowly consumes the edges of their world. Ruth is a fatally insecure young woman who compares herself relentlessly to her prettier best friend, Bridget. The two of them drink copious amounts of alcohol and party in what seems like a search for numbness rather than fun.
James is a young man who’s come to Montana to try to find out what he can of his real father. A middle-class kid by upbringing, he’s trying on a harder, drifter lifestyle to mixed effect. He and Ruth meet in a seemingly random encounter that, thanks to the novel’s air of paranoia, feels all but fated by the end.
It’s fire season, and so the desperate acts and self-loathing take place against an apocalyptic landscape of smoke and flame. The once idyllic valley is now home to a blank generation of youth whose inner disaffection mirrors the disaster taking shape just outside town. (In what may be the novel’s most bumper-sticker-worthy quote, Bridget remarks that “evacuation was for yuppies.”)
The writing is assertive, dark, and assured; the characters’ wounded psyches rendered with a fitting emotional flatness. Sometimes there is the slightest hint of especially black humor. Here is Bridget in a representative passage of interior monologue:
Someone was always watching. So I did what I could to remain composed. I stared at my clock and loved the nervous moves its hands made. I had no job, nowhere to be, so the time told me nothing. I’d found that clock in George’s basement after I’d tried to kill myself but before he sold the house and I left for Montana. At the time I’d hoped he’d tell me it had been my mother’s, but he just said he’d never seen it in his life.
At times, the bad behavior can feel like a preference for shock value over character development. And occasions of staccato, same-sounding dialog can sometimes read as less than what this author is capable of.
But more often the images and tonal bleakness succeed. And scenes of creepy dread, as when James camps at a site recommended by hobos, get under your skin. As do the sentences any time, really, that Wirth Cauchon writes about fire, sunsets, or the sky seen from seedy hotel rooms.
With so much lovely, razor-wire writing, Nothing rises above a somewhat orchestrated conclusion. Still, there are joys in “kryptonite” (a word used frequently and approvingly in Nothing) and the downward spiral. Nothing is a vital chronicle of things that should not be — sickly babies brought to parties, dead girls, people who will not listen and as a result cause others to get shot, fires that sweep down from the mountains like harbingers of the end times, and the sad, incontrovertible fact that in the search for who we are we are alone.
Read Nothing with a glass of water at hand. You’ll feel the smoke and flames.
Nothing
By Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon
Two Dollar Radio (November 26, 2013)
ISBN: 9781937512118