In from the cold
Certain dark-edged fairy tales and monster stories seem designed to frighten us awake rather than to help us fall asleep. In Rene Denfeld’s exceptionally riveting new novel, “The Child Finder,” a 5-yearold girl gets lost in the woods, in winter. Just as she’s about to freeze to death, a strange man rescues her and restores her to life in his isolated cabin. Is she doomed or saved? Can both be true?
“The Child Finder’s” mesmerizing narrative balances its weight on multiple cases of lost and found. Desperation propels the search for missing children, even when they vanished years earlier; the more time that passes since an abduction or disappearance, the less likely there will be a happy outcome. Denfeld’s protagonist Naomi is the woman known to police and to a particularly agonized group of parents as “the child finder.” She has a reputation for being relentless in her investigations, even for so-called hopeless cases; she also refuses to give up on solving a mysterious puzzle from her own obscured history. Her tireless efforts are devoted to proving that “no matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.”
In the necessary and uncomfortable places where Rene Denfeld locates her haunting fiction, the lines between victim and perpetrator can be painfully blurry. As she managed so deftly in her acclaimed first novel, “The Enchanted,” set within the narrowest confinements of death row, Denfeld insists that urgent stories exist on the extreme margins of our lives, especially when they depict those whom most of society would prefer to erase forever. Adding a tincture of the fantastical into a beaker of reality, Denfeld’s writing swirls and darkens; yet, just as often, tragedy blends and brightens with optimism. “Everyone needs faith,” Naomi thinks. “Faith that even though the world is full of evil, a suitor will come and kiss us awake; faith that the girl will escape the tower, the big bad wolf will die, and even those poisoned by malevolence can be reborn, as innocent as purity itself.”
What does it really mean to find compassion for a criminal? Not to excuse the behavior, but to inquire carefully into its sources, to dig for what’s hidden inside the bones and memory of the monster. Among the subtle yet profound ways Denfeld expresses the need for such effort: When we read about “the creature called B,” we see that this is how he views himself, whereas the child named Madison, who re-invents herself as “the snow girl,” thinks of him as “Mr. B.” And even as his captive, even alongside her three years of hypervigilance regarding his anger, she demonstrates her unbroken capacity for joy and love. Although the infinitely damaged Mr. B is trapped in the silence of being deaf and mute, the snow girl keeps trying to reach toward his buried humanity.
“Madison didn’t understand that people can be good and bad. Not like little-mistakes bad. Like big-mistakes bad. Like go-to-jail bad. She didn’t know that when you have that kind of bad inside you, it is not like your goodness is hiding it. It is more like the badness and the goodness are all mixed together.”
Denfeld’s practice of diligent listening occurs as much off the page as on the page. Even more than a novelist with a vast toolbox of creative talent, Denfeld pulls tales and details from a personal vault. She’s written firsthand accounts in the New York Times and elsewhere about her own childhood experience of domestic violence, victimization and abuse. But here’s the astonishing part: She is willing — no, she is determined — to climb inside the mind and heart and skin of the perpetrator. You can rest assured that there’s no gratuitous violence here, no gratuitous brutalization. What’s here is the unmistakable evidence of harm, as well as the endeavor to understand how and why it recurs. For Denfeld, and for her readers, questions of innocence and guilt aren’t limited to a courtroom or a prison. They belong not only within the pages of a novel but also at the center of our own awareness.
This exquisite, gracefully imagined novel brings nuanced empathy to that tragic zone in which victims of pedophilia can grow up to become perpetrators as adults. Giving voice to those who are metaphorically or even literally voiceless, Rene Denfeld reminds us that consequences continue, aftermath continues — yet we must somehow find ways of holding on to threads of hard-won hope. Yes, it’s true that violence can perpetuate more violence, but punishment and forgiveness are not the only answers. We are capable of envisioning more radical solutions. And sometimes, the answer begins with a story.