By Pam Walatka
In some families, the accusation “It’s all your fault” is a running joke used to dissipate accidental criticism. In the Cooper family, it’s serious. Deadly serious.
The Coopers struggle to untangle a family tragedy in “The Divide” (Putnam, 2005) by Nicholas Evans, author of “The Horse Whisperer,” a best seller made into a movie by Robert Redford. Evans’ understanding of horses was the key to that success; horses play a part in the new book, but not a central part. Evans writes well but doesn’t have anything new to say about people.
“The Divide” might be a good book to read while traveling - it’s somewhat entertaining - but it’s not deep enough to be a selection for your book club, unless a majority of you are fascinated by the details of divorce. The first two-thirds is readable; the last third is engaging.
Early in the book, the frozen body of a beautiful young woman is found under the snow high in the Rockies. She turns out to be Abbie, the long-lost daughter of Benjamin and Sarah Cooper, whose bitter divorce may have influenced Abbie to run off with an ecoterrorist and become wanted by the FBI for murder. “It’s all your fault,” Sarah tells Benjamin when they go to pick up the body.
“The Divide” refers to the dude ranch the family visited every year until things went bad; it also refers to the Continental Divide, around which much of the action takes place, and to the devastating divide that can develop between man and wife.
After they pick up the body, we flash back to when the Coopers were an intact family visiting the dude ranch. Most of the book recounts the events leading up to Abbie’s death. We see the underpinnings of the divorce. Sarah (the mom) had rejected many of Benjamin’s amorous advances and disdained much of his behavior.
“The power of human habit never failed to astonish her. How was it that two intelligent, decent people who basically loved each other could get locked into a pattern of behavior that neither of them - or so she presumed - enjoyed? It was as if each knew the role he or she was expected to take and had no choice but to play it. Sarah had often wondered if Benjamin felt as miserably miscast in their drama as she did. … As the years had gone by, like actors in some tired TV soap, they had become caricatures, marooned in their sad clichés, unable to contemplate any other way of being with each other. God, how tired of it she was. … She wondered what he thought … she had no doubt about her feelings for him. She loved him and always would.”
Earlier (the book bounces around in time), they argue about whether or not to move to the suburbs: “She didn’t want to live in the suburbs she said. Maybe it was the slightly scornful way she uttered the word, but he accused her, for the first time, of being a Westchester County snob and it so infuriated her that she didn’t speak to him for three days. A frost settled that neither of them seemed willing or able to thaw. They didn’t touch each other for more than a month.” They both withhold touch until the argument is solved, instead of using touch as a means to a solution.
Just when the reader is tiring of the Coopers’ behavior, they finally start evolving. We see the family struggle to adapt to their situation. Although the book is about tragedy, the ending is somewhat redemptive.
“The Divide” is getting mixed reviews. “This fourth novel lacks the power and intensity of Evans’s debut, ‘The Horse Whisperer’ (1995), and it’s not nearly as carefully written,” Publisher’s Weekly said. But “Evans demonstrates the same intricacy of plot and depth of characterization that defined his international best seller ‘The Horse Whisperer’ (1995),” according to Booklist.
Evans, who lives in London and Devon, England, reveres the Rocky Mountains. Describing the serenity on a rancher’s face, he writes, “Maybe it was simply from living in such a wondrous place.”
“The Divide” is available at Main Street Cafe & Books, 134 Main St., Los Altos.
