Stranger, by David Bergen (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2016)
David Bergen’s 2016 novel, Stranger, is two Homeric tales compressed and rolled into a single novel. In the Iliad portion of the novel, the high-powered Trojan American couple snatch a newborn infant even as the mother lies in recovery from the birth. Like an aggrieved Greek, the mother travels to the land of her enemies to “wage war” on their turf. With the wiles of an Odysseus, she insinuates herself into the couple’s midst and snatches back what is hers. In the Odyssey portion of the novel, mother and child undertake a harrowing journey through the southern United States to the Mexican border, and through Mexico to her home in Guatemala. Given that the story engages the reader with colonial attitudes, it is important to acknowledge the way it vibrates in sympathy with some of our most deeply entrenched mythic tales. Like the American characters, it would be easy to be dismissive: oh, this is just the story of an inconsequential girl from an inconsequential country. But finding the girl’s correlate in mythic heroes signals that we must take a broader view of things.
Íso Perdido works as a “keeper” at a Guatemalan fertility clinic where she attends to the needs of well-off American women who come there for the waters. She develops a relationship with a young gynaecologist, Eric Mann, who has come to work at the clinic perhaps as a way to put some distance between himself and his estranged wife, Susan. Despite the estrangement, Susan comes to the clinic where Íso is assigned to serve as her keeper. If Eric has an Achilles heel, it is that he likes to ride his motorcycle without a helmet and, as Anton Chekhov has famously stated, if in the first chapter you present a motorcyclist who doesn’t wear a helmet then, in the second chapter, you have to make him crash his motorcycle and suffer a permanent brain injury. Susan retrieves her injured husband and takes him home to far-off Troy America where he vegetates behind the walls of a lovely gated community.
For two people who are supposed to be knowledgeable in matters of women’s reproductive health, Eric and Íso seem not to have mastered the art of birth control. When Susan learns that her husband has impregnated her keeper, she conspires with the director of the clinic to snatch the baby straight from the birthing room and to transport her to that gated community in the far-off land of white America. This seems the ultimate expression of colonial arrogance: to presume that one is entitled to an infant without regard for the mother. Although Íso feels bewildered and powerless, as she gains strength, she decides she cannot do nothing. She arranges to cross the US border illegally and works her way to Susan and Eric’s home. There, she “besieges” the home by taking a job as a domestic helper in a neighbour’s home. She walks her employer’s dog and discovers that Eric walks the baby, Meja, at regular times. Eric doesn’t remember her, so she befriends him, getting closer and closer until an opportunity presents itself.
After the Odyssey portion of the story, Bergen offers a coda. Like Íso, Susan Mann is a determined woman who refuses to accept the “theft” of her baby. Part of the tension in Íso’s return to Guatemala arises from the fact that she is pursued by someone in private employ of the Manns. But he oversteps, arriving early in Íso’s hometown while Íso is still working her way through Mexico. As a gringo, the agent stands out like a sore thumb and his purpose is obvious to all the locals. Íso’s uncle takes matters into his own hands and the agent quietly disappears.
A couple observations:
First, Bergen is a masterful prose stylist. Reading Stranger is the literary equivalent of drinking 18 year old Highland Park Scotch. Absolutely smooth.
Second, there is a lingering question I have about Bergen’s writing which I first posed when reading The Age of Hope in connection with men who write women and which reasserts itself with more force in connection with white men who write women of colour. In a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and anger around Residential Schools have thrust issues of identity and histories of colonial oppression into the foreground of public conversation, the question arises as to the function of the arts in this regard. Are the arts yet another forum for public conversation? If so, who gets to speak? And what are the rules? Or is there a sense in which aesthetic aims stand apart from matters of personal identity? Are identity and aesthetics like apples and oranges? I don’t intend to address these questions here, but simply to flag them and point out that, potentially, a novel like Stranger can be a flashpoint for a difficult reckoning. Bergen may be brave. Or foolish.