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Contemporary High Modernism

It would be hard to read more than one page of David Madden’s short novel Abducted by Circumstance without thinking of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), as the opening scene presents a pilgrimage to a lighthouse rendered in a high modernist prose style that demands the reader’s full attention. The novel begins with the cry of gulls and the breaking of ice: “The ice on the lake was heaving, like a sleeping person’s chest—ice breaking up down there, crying out in the twilight, like seagulls, children, women, snow beginning to come down lightly.” What children? What women? Then almost as if watching a jarring handheld documentary of a crime—say the Zapruder film or some YouTube video gone viral—the reader is given an ugly little window into violence. A man with a black ski mask looms over a frozen lake, “searching for someone out there on the ice that heaved and sank, cracked, cried.” In juxtaposition to the man in the mask, an attractive, almost radiant, woman “steps up onto the observation deck, as if onto a stage....” The man with a ski mask pulls a gun and forces her into his truck covered with snow and salt. The only eyewitness to the abduction—besides the reader—is the novel’s protagonist, Carol Seabold, a longtime resident of the Thousand Islands of New York. She has come, we are told, to the Tibbet’s Point Lighthouse on the Canadian border with her six-year-old daughter, Melissa, in “hope of experiencing rare moments.” And indeed the beauty of the woman stepping onto the observation deck strikes such a chord in Carol that she seems to shout out to the lady telepathically even before the man with the ski mask pulls his gun, “Do you hear the cries yet?”, perhaps speaking of the gulls. “Carol surprised herself that she had spoken to the lady, as clearly as if aloud.” After the lady’s abduction, this telepathic link becomes the dominant narrative mode of the novel, which amounts to a sort of empathetic stream of consciousness. Carol experiences the lady’s fear and humiliation as if it were her own, as well as her numerous strategies to connect with the masked rapist and killer—talking about her family, asking for a cigarette—in hopes of becoming more than an object, a person rather than a thing that can be easily dispensed with. In turn, Carol/the lady name the masked man F, for failure; surely this is a man who takes revenge on hapless women for his inability to succeed in everyday life. Later Carol will learn that the abducted woman is named Glenda Hamilton, and her empathic link with the lady becomes more detailed as she learns about Glenda’s successful civic ventures, her children, and her husband, a famous surgeon dying of lung cancer in New York City. Carol also learns that F must surely be the Day Light Serial Killer (so named for his daytime abductions), a man responsible for the rape, torture, and murder of seven other women. The novel spans the length of eight days, eight days in which Carol lives out Glenda Hamilton’s abduction as if it were her own. During these eights days, Carol also begins to realize the ways she has been abducted by the circumstances of her own life. Carol is in her late thirties, still recovering psychologically as well as physically from a breast cancer scare. In the wake of this medical terror, Carol no longer feels satisfied or comfortable in the role of modest housewife and mother. Her first husband was killed in Iraq. Her second husband Jack, a petulant and angry man, spends his time in sports bars carousing with his friends. Carol’s adolescent son, Tim, ignores her, and her father is a cold and aloof philosophy professor who seems disappointed by her choices. Her mother, a nurse and a devout Christian, committed suicide years ago, but her memory serves as an example to Carol, who dreams of going back to school and becoming a nurse too. In short, though Carol was once a bohemian with a lust for life (as a young woman she rode a bicycle all the way across Greece), she has become a small, mousy woman who must come to terms with the ways her life has been determined and constructed. Like Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, she works very hard just to keep her family from disintegrating.