Novel’s dark view may be overdone

THE MINERAL PALACE, by Heidi Julavits, Putnam Publishing Group, New York, 2000, 400 pages, $23.95.

Although the 1934 American Dust Bowl may seem as different from late summer Maine as it’s possible to get, Portland-born Heidi Julavits is up to the task: After just a few pages, readers of “The Mineral Palace” are immersed in Pueblo, Colo., during the Great Depression.

But the trip isn’t an easy one, not for the reader, and not for Julavits’ protagonist, Bena Duse, and her husband, Ted. Reluctantly leaving their home in Minnesota for physician Ted’s new job on the Front Range, the Duses and their baby drive through an empty, menacing landscape (a road sign en route says “DODGE, IOWA. LEAVE. WE ALL DID.”) until they reach their home.

By that time, we know a thing or two about Ted, a philanderer who feels “comfortable causing [Bena] pain,” and about Bena, who creates order in her world in any way she can. Mostly, her method involves numbers: she analyzes them to pry out their hidden meanings. The number 16, for example, the sum of the four digits of the odometer reading, is a good omen – the number of her father’s football jersey. Between Bena’s compulsive counting and Ted’s compulsive cruelties, we’re not surprised that their marriage is crumbling just as the land around them is.

Julavits, whose stories have been published in Esquire, Story and Zoetrope, was designated a Writer-on-the-Verge in 1999 by The Village Voice Literary Supplement; this novel demonstrates that she’s no longer on the verge. She has an unerring sense of imagery, allowing her to create a time and place neither she nor most of her readers have ever seen. “Rainbow trout and brown carp floated on the Arkansas like lost hats,” she writes, and a building “sloped heavily to one side like the face of a stroke victim.”

Not only the landscape comes into focus, however: people, too, are revealed with brief but telling descriptions.

In fact, you can learn a lot about America in the ’30s by seeing Pueblo, Colo., through Bena’s eyes. Looking for a way to fill her days, she takes a part-time job at the local newspaper and quickly becomes fascinated with the alley she sees from her office window. Drawn ever closer to the rooming house and bar off the alley, the hookers and men who inhabit them, she soon begins observing it all face to face. Maude, a pregnant hooker whose life becomes linked with Bena’s, hungrily sucks on butcher paper, which “was soaked through with the pink, watery runoff from pork chops, flank steaks, crown roasts.”

Soon enough, the setting has become a metaphor for the characters’ lives and natures. “What is not bare and destroyed, what is not eroded, what is not unrecognizable and infertile?” Bena wonders. Her new home, filled with the “poetic and grotesque, pitiful and funny” slowly settles into her soul.

As the town’s secrets are revealed, so too are Bena’s: the loss of her brother, Jonas; her infatuation with the intriguing Red Grissom; her growing conviction that something is seriously wrong with her baby, Little Ted. The town’s dryness and infertility, the constant dust storms, the grit everywhere, the fish ponds Ted digs, where only dead fish float – what can come out of such barren ground except violence and tragedy?

Doom, as palpable and threatening as any dust storm, hangs over Julavits’ Pueblo, Colo. From the ironworks and the rendering plant to the grand houses and the Mineral Palace, built as a proud statement of Pueblo’s initial mining wealth, all is decay and rot. Husbands and wives betray one another; women kill their babies, both in and out of the womb; characters move inexorably toward death. The only creatures inhabiting the dust-cloaked streets and hills are rats, maggots, poisonous snakes.

Eventually, of course, Bena’s numbers can no longer protect her from chaos. She weighs and measures Little Ted several times a day, charting his steady growth, but finally realizes that “the more of him that existed, the less of him there seemed to be.” She adds, multiplies, divides license plate numbers, street addresses, dates, but in the end: “Her own system had failed her.”

The novel is as neatly put together as even Bena would wish, characters playing out their own tragedies over and over again, strapped to wheels of misery. Many Americans living through the Great Depression must surely have felt that sense of hopeless futility, the dryness of the spirit if not always of the letter.

If it seems to you that “The Mineral Palace” is unremittingly bleak, you’re right. As evocative as it may be, I believe Julavits goes just a little too far into the land of the gothic and the grotesque. She’s got enough of those poetic, pitiful stories here for three or four volumes; even Dante knew that Inferno was only part of the story. Julavits’ 1934 Pueblo, Colo., is peopled entirely by the weak, the maimed, the cruel, the perverted; as one might expect, what issues from them is incest, murder, suicide, corruption. When Maude throws her newborn child into the deep hole at the rendering plant, a hole filled with the rotting carcasses of cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, goats and legions of flies, the reader can’t help but feel he’s wandered out of Colorado and into a nightmare.

“The Mineral Palace’ is dedicated to Julavits’ editor and to her grandmother, who lived in Pueblo during the Depression; Julavits says that her grandmother was “as gregarious and publicly available as she was cryptic and covert.” She sounds like a strong, fascinating character – perhaps an inspiration for another novel, one about the generation of Americans forged and strengthened in the crucible of poverty and perseverance.

Margery Irvine lives and writes in Blue Hill and teaches English at the University of Maine in Orono.