JEAN VAN LOON

Shot-Blue by Jesse Ruddock

In Shot-Blue, Jesse Ruddock takes us to an isolated northern lake where the few inhabitants, mysterious and compelling, grope both physically and emotionally for ways to sustain themselves. The first part of Shot-Blue focuses on ten-year-old Tristan and his mother Rachel. Newly returned to the lake, Rachel bears facial scars that are never explained, though the reader sees them vividly. Without financial or emotional resources, she struggles to guide her son while also fearing it is she from whom he may need protection. Tristan, on the other hand, needs love but does not know how to ask for it. In the second part of the book, Thomasin, a southern girl at the lake for a summer job, sixteen years old to Tristan’s thirteen, wants to connect with Tristan, precisely because, unlike the other men she works with, he appears indifferent to her. The geographic isolation of the setting is echoed in Rachel and Tristan’s social isolation; she’s withdrawn and suspect and he isn’t like the local boys. The novel’s characters are also personally isolated; when one reaches out to another, the gesture falters or is rejected. This builds tension at first, but becomes so pervasive in later parts of the book that it begins to feel formulaic. However, the author’s skilled and

fluid changes in point of view allow us to see inside the heads of her characters and feel with them. With precise and unusual language that reflects Ruddock’s intimate knowledge of this landscape, her descriptions evoke at different times danger, beauty, solace. Hinting at violence and risk, she characterizes the lake’s shape as that of a decapitated cliff-jumper reaching up for his lost head. She shows us a sunrise “like the [open] gills of a fish, showing the red breathing ribbons.” In the paths between the huts of ice fishermen, solitary Tristan sees a pattern of people helping each other and finds it beautiful. Shot-Blue, like Sheila Watson’s classic, The Double Hook, achieves a certain mythic quality by focusing on the elemental nature of the characters in their natural environment. With little backstory, the characters play out their life in the moment. There are no smartphones in this book, no pop songs to define its period. The characters enact their universal longings: Rachel’s love in the hand she rests on Tristan’s neck, her fingers stretched into his thick black hair; Tristan’s need for companionship by sitting close “like a little animal” to the ice fisherman who allows him into his hut; Tristan and Thomasin’s ease together while paddling through a storm’s darkness and lightning. This powerful first novel features original, visceral descriptions and characters who are idiosyncratic and interesting. It is worth reading and re-reading.