Tenacious women

~ Traps, by Mackenzie Bezos ~

I must admit I picked up this novel because of the author’s last name. So let’s get that elephant out of the way first. The author married Jeff Bezos, who then went on to found Amazon (they recently divorced). She graduated from Princeton, where she studied creative writing. Her bio says she has also worked a wide variety of jobs, including dishwasher, waitress, clothing salesperson, deli cashier, restaurant hostess, library monitor, data entry clerk, tutor, nanny and research assistant to Toni Morrison. She was a research associate at the DE Shaw hedge fund when she met Jeff. This is all to point out that she has accomplishments and personality beyond her marital history. She is the author of two novels.

I wondered whether her novels were essentially vanity publishing. After all, they were written in 2006 and 2013, a time when Amazon was dominating book sales. They were published by solidly establishment publishers (Knopf and Harper Collins), who doubtless had deals with Amazon.

But I’m happy to report that Bezos is a capable writer. She is not lyrical, not given to Arundhati Roy-like flights of fanciful wordplay, nor does she tackle broad sociopolitical topics like slavery or climate change. Bezos tends towards the precise and clear (as befits a DE Shaw research associate), and writes about very specific characters. Her writing leans heavily on depth of detail, which steadily builds up until you can clearly imagine the space and the characters.

On the clean floor of the hall closet, beside two pairs of neatly aligned running shoes, there is a space for her backpack. The bedroom beyond has a light blue blanket and a smooth fold of white topsheet beneath another Escher print — this one of triangle tiles that row by row part and change just slightly, until at the top they fly away as birds. She showers in a small clean bathroom where all the personal items hide secreted behind a mirror, and dresses in jeans and white T-shirt and afterward steps to her living room, where, with a slow pull of a cord, she draws the blinds half open, filling the white room with light. She cracks the window and flamenco music drifts to her from across the way.

Traps follows four very different women whose paths cross during the course of the book. One is Dana, an extremely capable, introverted bodyguard who is trained in special ops. At present she is bodyguard to Jessica, an Oscar-winning actress who needs protection from the paparazzi. The other two women seem to have no connection to Dana and Jessica at first. They are Lynn, a recovering alcoholic who lives alone in Nevada, has one prosthetic hand, and runs a no-kill shelter for dogs largely by herself. Then there is Vivian, a seventeen-year-old prostitute who has just given birth to twins, and is trying to escape from her pimp.

It can be jarring to jump from character to character in a book: just as you get invested in one character, you find yourself reading about another. In this novel, though, each character is given enough space and depth that you eventually develop an interest in their lives and motivations. Four main characters might be a bit much, as most readers will inevitably have more interest in some than the others. Personally, I would have preferred a novel focused on just Dana and Jessica, or just Lynn and Vivian.

All the women have issues in their past, based on their behaviour and personality, and hints as to these issues emerge through the book. (Except for Dana, whose commitment issues are left largely unexplored, but they are so intense as to surely have been caused by some traumatic event in her past?)

Of the four, one would imagine that Jessica — beautiful, talented, Oscar-winning, Hollywood connections, happily married to a very nice Indian-American doctor, but whose father keeps selling her personal stuff out to the paparazzi — might be the most interesting. In fact, it is Lynn — damaged, forever in recovery as are most alcoholics, yet tough as nails — who most captured this reader’s imagination.

She stands alone in her barn coat by a window looking out over an empty plain of creosote bush and dry red-brown soil and one distant barn beneath a strip of bright blue sky in the barren scrublands of southern Nevada.

As you see, the entire novel is written in present tense, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator.

The title? Lynn says:

Life is full of things that feel like traps. Our own weaknesses and mistakes. Unlucky accidents. The violence done to us by others. But they’re not always what they seem. Sometimes later we see that they led us where we needed to go.

This then is a novel about resilience. Lynn and Dana are shaken by events in their pasts and their own emotional issues, but they soldier on anyway, and handle all kinds of situations with aplomb. Vivian is perhaps the most damaged and vulnerable, because of her age, but she is determined enough to get away from her pimp to save her two little babies. Jessica, who seems to have the most protection and support, also seems to be the most fragile.

The women are strong characters, and quite distinct, but the sheer volume of description can sometimes weigh down the novel and make some sections a bit flat. There is a slow build-up of tension through the first half of the book, which is nicely done. One of the connections is quite unexpected. The final resolution is not entirely satisfying, but is adequate. I’ll keep an eye out for her first novel in the library, just to see if her style changed over the years.