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Sealed Fates: A Novel That's Locked Into Its Own Prophecies

October 15, 2000|By Alyce Miller. Alyce Miller's latest book is the novel "Stopping for Green Lights." She teaches creative writing and literature at Indiana University.

The crumbling Mineral Palace, once a spectacular testament to the thriving mining industry, is never relieved of its burden as metaphor for decay and corruption. Though filled with interesting historical details, the novel is stuffed with twists and turns that scream "plot points," and with much careless writing. A line like the following, meant to give us insight into Bena, only serves to obscure her character more: "The combination of baby and bag made her heavy and slow-moving, and brought her to question the evolutionary rationale to so many things, things that would prevent her from escaping whatever primitive pursuer might engage her in a chase." Upon first meeting Horace Gast, Bena observes that, "The lips drew back again, making a weak stab at cheerfulness." At a local society event, Bena notes that Ted, eyes on a woman named Bess, "was mesmerized by her, or at least by her top half." Scenes of passion are often filled with bitten nipples and some variation on the "quivery, split-open sensation" that marked Bena's first sexual encounter with Ted. Atmospheric descriptions like this one suffer from overwriting: "The ever-present stench from the sewers had become so effectively integrated with the normal air that it shocked her when she noticed its pungency." And attempts at philosophical rhapsodies on the general human condition dissolve into vagueness: "Bena thought back to Mary, her fear that to predict people's futures would only give them license to misbehave in the ways they'd always dreamed of misbehaving, of fulfilling their darkest yearnings and comforting themselves with the thought that they were simply complying with the design of forces bigger than they."

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published Oct. 29, 2000.

To say a book is uneven is not particularly helpful; it's akin to saying all people are flawed. A certain amount of unevenness is inherent in any novel. But the unevenness here is not a byproduct of narrative strengths and could have been avoided by more careful and detailed attention to language and character development. A rather quaint theme informing the novel is that volition seems to be illusory, and it is part of our human destiny to perform what fate has predetermined. During a palm reading by soothsayer Mary, Bena is told, " This means you are prone to fury, violence, bloodthirstiness of the slow-burning kind.' " Mary adds, " `Sometimes I wonder why a person would ever want to know about herself like this. . . . Don't make any difference, right? Oedipus still lay with his mother.' "

Reliance on such predictions means "The Mineral Palace" does little more than fulfill its own prophecies, as it moves along toward the fated, lurid and foretold end (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).