Book review: “The Thin Place” by Kathryn Davis

Kathryn Davis’s strange, wonderful, courageous 2006 novel The Thin Place starts with three 12-year-old girlfriends walking down a trail to a lake.

One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall.

So far, so good. It’s an opening that will seem familiar to many a reader. But — reader beware — it isn’t that kind of a novel, as the next words indicate:

This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they’d seen, what they’d done or failed to do. The dead souls no longer wore gowns. They’d gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.

This was written two decades ago, but, of course, it could have been written today.

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been a time when the “unspeakable” seems to happen with ever greater frequency, a time when many of us remain in a permanent state of shock, reeling from what we’ve seen, what we’ve done and failed to do.

Having started this way, Davis doesn’t dwell on it. Her story is focused on dozens of people in the small town of Varennes and their interactions over a period of several months. Neither does she get back directly to the dead souls and their “immense soundless chord.”

 

“The invasion”

Instead, Davis keeps this shocking era deep in the background of her novel, allowing it to pop up only every once in a while, such as when she mentions that, “the day the invasion started,” Piet Zeebrugge, one of her characters, “had been in New York on business, heading down Fifth Avenue past the Guggenheim when it suddenly began to rain.”

What invasion? Who invaded? Where?  Davis doesn’t say although, at the bottom of the same page, she adds:

And then the United States made friends with Russia or at least pretended to. For a brief period everything seemed to go back to normal, meaning the idea that people might destroy an entire planet faded from the foreground.

And, similarly, the invasion, whatever it was, fades from the foreground of The Thin Place.

 

“Dangerous things”

Later, at an ad hoc meeting of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church parishioners, James Trumbell, an usher, warns, “There are things abroad in the land, dangerous things, things that don’t even bear thinking about.”

But he and the others aren’t talking about the invasion or the unspeakable. They’re mad about a bald homeless woman who’s taken up illicit residence in the church and, even more outrageous, has joined the choir, welcomed for her beautiful voice.

At the novel’s end, on Pentecost Sunday, the unspeakable will thrust its way into Davis’s story, and the homeless woman, whose name, it turns out, is Sally Edwards, will be right in the center of it.

 

Unspeakable?

But this isn’t a novel about the horrifically unspeakable. Instead, it is a story of those three sixth-grade girls and their families and the people they and their families know and, for the most part, have known all their lives. And their dogs.

And people in the past, including one schoolteacher, Inez Fair, who, in 1872, was paddling a boat that capsized and drowned eight children, aged 3 to 13. Was that unspeakable?

Andrea Murdock in present-day Varennes is rebinding Inez’s diary while her husband, Daniel Murdock, is off to the arctic regions where he’s discovered the body of a young Inuit boy who’d been given a chief’s burial a thousand years ago and, oddly, was buried face-down “with a rock on his back to hold him in place.” Was that unspeakable?

 

The three girlfriends

On one level, The Thin Place is a tour de force creation of a small-town world in which Davis brings to life not only dozens of characters but also the webs of their interactions, and not just in the present but back into the past — many of them are from families that have lived in this area for more than a century — and not just in the human world but also in the community of dogs and among the population of beavers and other wild animals.

In terms of story, The Thin Place is sprawling, but not in terms of pages, just 275. There is an intensity to the prose, a denseness to the narrative.

So much is happening from section to section, most of which are only a couple pages or so, that, whenever a character reappears, the full name is almost always used: Carl Banner, Helen Zeebrugge, Richard Jenkins, Billie Carpenter, Janet Peake, George Mason, Chloe Brock, Mimi Jenkins, Florence Quill, Warren Hommeyer, Malcolm Brock. The exceptions are when Davis is inside the thoughts of the three girlfriends; then, the characters are Mr. Mason and Mrs. Murdock.

There is no central character in The Thin Place although, in a way, the three girlfriends could be thought of in that way, as a group.

 

Off balance

Lorna Fine is the tall one. Sunny Crockett is the pretty one. Mees Kipp, named for the French river, is the small one. In the way of children, they have been friends for seemingly all their lives.

At the beach, they find a very large man, “dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and not much else, lying on his stomach in the sand with his head facing the lake.” It’s Mr. Banner from Sunny’s church.

This is significant, but, first, it’s important to point out how, throughout her novel, Davis drops in small things designed to throw the reader off balance. Such as:

• Sunny Crockett: The girl’s name echoes that of Detective James “Sonny” Crockett, a key character in the highly successful television series Miami Vice (1984-1990). Novelists don’t usually employ character names from other popular works.
• George Mason: The famous George Mason was one of the nation’s Founding Fathers and is the namesake of George Mason University.  By using this name, Davis sets off odd, seemingly irrelevant, ripples in the mind of the reader.
• Varennes: There is a Varennes that’s a suburb of Montreal, but that’s not the town where The Thin Place is set. It seems to be in Vermont. There are a good number of mentions of Canada, and one character drives to Montreal. This is like setting a story in Chicago, but locating it in the middle of Indiana.
• “what they’d done or failed to do”: These words echo the line in the Confiteor of the Roman Catholic Mass about sinning “in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.”
• Baal: The morning after good sex, Billie Carpenter is feeling satisfied: “The best sex was that way — like a heathen god had momentarily paid a visit. Baal, protector of livestock and crops and killer of infants.” Why, of all heathen gods, Baal? Why the cattle guardian and baby murderer?

Any one of these might seem a momentary oddity in the novel, but there are so many of them that it’s clear Davis is up to something.

 

Thin places

And here’s another oddity.

It seems from elliptical comments that occur over the next hundred pages or so of the novel that, when the three girlfriends find Mr. Banner, he’s dead or dying. Yet, he survives, mentioning several times that he almost died. His wife Glenda Banner tells Billie Carpenter: “He says he doesn’t remember any of it except right before he opened his eyes. He was dead, and a little girl was calling him back.”

That little girl: Mees Kipp.

It turns out that, in a very low-key, understated way, Mees has the ability to save someone, human or dog or chick, from death or bring someone back to life. It has to do, in some mystic way, with connecting closely to Jesus.

This is the meaning of the title of Davis’s novel. Mees is able to get to the thin places of existence, moments when the wall between the physical and spiritual worlds is very permeable. Davis doesn’t explain this, but the reader accompanies Mees at some of these moments.

At the age of three, at Easter, Mees and her family are at a boardwalk where dyed baby chicks are for sale, except one “which wasn’t cheeping and marching about like the other chicks in that strangely heavy-footed way of infant poultry but had topped over onto its side and was perfectly silent, its eyes tight shut and with a large black ant crawling across its breast.”

Mees closes her eyes and leans in, and “the lavender chick opened its eyes. It got up, puffed out its feathers. It opened its little yellow beak and said cheep.”

 

The reality of the spiritual

This may make it seem that, at bottom, Mees is the central character of The Thin Place. But that’s wrong.

She has an ability that no one else has, but, then, so do many of the other characters.  Think of the singing of Sally Edwards.

At its deepest level, Kathryn Davis’s brave and wildly ambitious novel is about the reality of the spiritual. You can’t have a thin place unless there is something on the other side of the physical.

Of all the people in Varennes, Mees is most aware of this other world sharing a common existence with the flesh and everything else tangible. But she’s not as aware as some creatures are, such as Chloe Brock’s black-and-white cat Beulah who, at one point, is lost and wanders into St. Luke’s during a storm.

She poked her nose out from under the pew where Helen Zeebrugge usually sat, and looked around; though the person who had tried to kick her was nowhere in sight, she knew she wasn’t alone. Nor did Beulah think she’d suddenly stumbled into God’s presence, since like most animals she dwelt there all the time in happy oblivion.

No, it’s the sparrow that flew into the church during the service and is now perched on the rood screen, happy to be dry.

Lost was a concept foreign to the sparrow, since unlike Beulah, he belonged to no one. A fowl of the air who neither sowed nor did he reap, yet his heavenly Father made sure he had plenty of food — though of course he didn’t know that either.

 

A complex web

In The Thin Place, Mees is just one member of the hugely complex web of people, animals, nature and the planet. She is not the central character of the novel, but is an example of every other being in the book.

Mees is more aware than others of the permeability of the physical and spiritual aspects of existence, but everyone — Helen Zeebrugge, James Trumbell, Billie Carpenter, Lorna Fine, Malcolm Brock, Sunny Crockett, Sally Edwards — lives that existence even if they pay little or no attention to its intangible side.

Helen Zeebrugge, who is 92, is more aware than most, knowing that her time in the physical is very close to its end.

When a lawyer confronts her injured friend Janet Peake with a document to sign, noting, “Your son hired me to look into the unfortunate event that landed you where you are now.”

Helen quips: “Birth?”

 

“A green and pliant universe”

All humans know that, with birth, they’ve started on a journey with only one end.

The final three-page section of The Thin Place mentions a lot of deaths, not during the time of the novel, but later. Davis details the deaths of the old people, and then others, adding:

The young people all died too, but many years later. Even the Brackney baby.

The Thin Place is a novel about the whole of existence. About all the levels on which every creature lives, even if we don’t pay attention to them or, like the animals, have the brain capacity to envision them.

And maybe, when Helen Zeebrugge dies, she is as close as anyone can be in touch with the spiritual while still remaining, for a few short moments, in the physical.

[She] died peacefully in her sleep, dreaming of herself rising on the stalk of a green and pliant universe that opened like a water lily.

The Thin Place opens like a water lily to the fullness of being.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

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