Trespass: A Novel

by Valerie Martin

Book Overview

Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385515456
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.1" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Excellent

I never give 5 stars, but I think this book is worth it. Great characters, a variety of locales, literary references that were on the verge of overdrawn but good in the end, and excellent writing. This book has it all.

Fascinating Characters

What Valerie Martin's characters do isn't as interesting as who they are. Watching her create the intricate nuances of even the minor players in this excellent morality play is like observing an origami master at work. As in Property (another Martin work I highly recommend), each of the characters is someone we both like and dislike, respect and abhor. Chloe Dale, the protagonist, leads the life many of us would love to have. She's talented, successful, relaxed, and fulfilled. She's also overly protective of her son, Toby, and has a streak of bigot in her that makes the reader sit up and take notice. It's the mix of sweet and sour that makes Chloe a fully-realized human being--and one fascinating to read about. You'll have mixed feelings about every one of the characters: husband Brendan is unambitious but level-headed, son Toby a romantic naif blinded by his hormones. His wife Salome, a Croatian refugee, is mysteriously seductive and parasitic. Jelena, the unidentified narrator of great swatches of the book, is revealed like a slowly peeling onion. There are enough plot twists and action to carry the story along, but the real pleasure in reading Trespass is in discovering the characters as Martin's fruitful mind conceived them.

Trespass: Viewpoint

Valerie Martin's novel, Trespass, is both interesting and provocative. It offers no easy solutions and makes no definitive judgments about the modern world, but it does give a realistic view of individuals in our increasingly diverse society. Moreover, the novel objectively portrays the difficulty of idealism when it encroaches on personal choices and values.

Great Novel

Others have said it better than I could but wanted to get my 5-star rating counted to support this talented author. A highly readable masterpiece!

" 'But it's our forest.' "

Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Samuel P. Huntington all theorized about the ebb, flow, and clashes of civilizations and cultures. Valerie Martin, it can be said, follows in their footsteps in TRESPASS. But rather than produce a long, dry macroscopic history; she writes a micro-drama in the form of a finely-tuned, exquisitely-layered novel about the Dale family. Brendan and Chloe Dale live an hour and a half from NYC, in the Catskill Mountains. They own ten acres that include a posted woods where an immigrant hunter persistently trespasses and tries to shoot deer, aggravating and unsettling Chloe. Chloe illustrates books, and her current commission, which she is painstakingly researching, is a special edition of WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Brendan is professor writing about Frederick of Hohenstaufen, a thirteenth-century emperor rather neglected by history. Their son, Toby, is an honors student at New York University who meets and falls for Salome Drago, a volatile, abrasive young woman of Catholic Croatian descent who is also attending NYU. Salome was a child when she and her father and brothers fled their Balkans homeland during the ethnic cleansing. Right from their first meeting, Salome and Chloe squabble and skirmish. In TRESPASS, Martin sets scene after scene to illustrate the shifting sands of culture, class, and civilization, including unflinching sections told by someone who remained in the festering, furious Balkans after Salome and most of her family escaped. This italic narrator relates the horrors witnessed and personally suffered as Yugoslavia violently dissolved into constituent, primarily ethnic states. The affluent, agnostic Eastern Dales who join their (mainly) liberal friends in marches against war -- in the novel's 2003-2004 time frame, the Iraq War is about to be declared -- will either, TRESPASS cautions, acquiesce gracefully (even eagerly?) to the inevitability of changing demographics, or not...but resistance won't alter that inevitability. Toby charges ahead, "I want to know Salome. I want to know everything about her. That's my mission." Brendan prefers to go with the flow and avoid confrontations; when the would-be deer poacher invades again, he'd rather just not venture into the woods. Chloe isn't made that way; she calls her son "an idiot" for letting Salome into their lives, and she would argue against the hunter, " 'But it's our forest.' " Whether one agrees or not with the premise that America is irremediably passing to a new set of custodians, this highly intelligent, complex novel should not be missed. TRESPASS is a veritable treasure trove of memorable imagery and symbolism. Included are astute and evolving historical analyses by Brendan. Chloe, meanwhile, hypothesizes on how a meeting between Emily Bronte and Henry David Thoreau might have gone -- "Could two more disparate sensibilities ever have occupied the planet at the same time?" -- and muses about Bronte's Heathcliff as "the vengeful orphan, the ungrat