Adultery has been mostly absent from serious literature since the days of Madame Bovary, though it remains a staple in the world of the soap opera and mass market paperback. In Be Mine, poet/novelist Laura Kasischke dares to explore the sordid anatomy of a love affair in a literary novel. Though she does not quite succeed in showering infidelity with beauty or higher meaning, Kasischke does manage to turn it on its head and reveal dark, even frightening consequences.
Narrated in the first person by Sherry Seymour, an English prof at a community college, the novel begins with an anonymous love note on Valentine's Day. Sherry finds it in her school mailbox. Over the next few weeks, additional letters surface, filled with sweet nothings like "You are so beautiful that my thoughts of you melt even this frozen month for me..."
At first intrigued by her secret admirer, the notes and possibilities they represent begin to exert an almost obsessive hold over Sherry's imagination and vanity. Could it be her cute (but probably gay) colleague Robert Z? Some student? Or hunky Bram Smith, the auto mechanics instructor who, rumor has it, talks in front of his class about some babe in the English department?
Sherry is in her forties, living a happy if humdrum existence with her husband Jon and son Chad. Thanks to an elliptical machine at the gym she's kept fit and trim, but she hasn't thought seriously about another man in years. Chad, however, is now in college, and Jon seems strangely excited about the idea of sharing her with another man. With the intoxication of spring in her blood, Sherry slips out of her old role and self-image and into the dangerous, erotic waters of an affair.
As with her masterpiece The Life Before Her Eyes, Kasischke sees the world with a poet's eye, filled with brilliant fragmented images and half-thoughts:
All day there's been a bright blue sky, and the snow's begun to melt in shiny patches on the lawns, a few luminous rivulets running freely along the shoulders of the roads, the military spangles and insignia of winter starting to wash away. Walking from the car to the Liberal Arts Building, I could smell mud, and there were some crows in a puddle in the parking lot. When I walked by, they flustered and flew off, and a drop of water landed at the center of my forehead-some bit of melted snow falling from the wing of a crow as it flew over, and I felt as if I'd been baptized by a priest of spring.
It is the old metaphor of spring and love, of course, but other passages contain more disturbing images of blood and death-a rabbit run over, a deer Sherry hits with her car, the slow descent into senility of Sherry's father. Then there is Garrett, Chad's childhood friend who is joining the military, and the cold, muted plainsong of the war in Iraq in the background.
Be Mine is more than a simple bodice-ripper, though it is as erotic as its rose-petal cover promises. We are both fascinated and thrilled to watch Sherry's intimate fantasies played out with her husband and lover. But reader beware-Kasischke has a way of heartlessly wielding the knife against her own characters. This is not the sympathetic take on adulterers that we find in, say, Jude the Obscure. Be Mine is a simpler, faster novel, clear and chilly as a dead rose in winter.
- Joel Van Valin