Coming of age and falling apart
Edmonton writer’s unsettling novel depicts abuse through the eyes of a teenage boy
It happens in an instant, a moment of first contact that will shatter lives and create unthinkable futures: The moment 14-year-old Adam Lisinski first sees Beatrice Cyr. “The woman lowered herself from Marv’s pickup truck wearing the first pair of high-heeled shoes I’d ever seen touch Jefferson Street. At contact she lifted one from the gravel like she had stepped into a colony of snails and looked up the sunburned lawn at me.” The opening lines of The Empress of
Idaho, the powerful new novel from Edmonton writer Todd Babiak, set the stage for a devastating coming-of-age story, a novel of betrayal and abuse and the lingering effects of both.
Before Beatrice’s arrival in Monument Colo., early in the summer of 1989, Adam’s life orbits largely around his mother, who works in a veterinary office — “She euthanized sick animals and strays, the unloved, and it devilled her” — his girlfriend Phoebe, his best friend Simon and his fledgling football career. Beatrice, who moves to town as the surprising, much younger wife of Adam’s neighbour Marv, quickly and methodically upturns the small-town calm, drawing Adam’s mother into a real-estate plan that looks like a scam, and pulling Adam into a relationship that is first friendly, then intimate, then brutally sexual.
Babiak skilfully develops his characters and their connections in a manner that reveals their individual depths and documents the effect Beatrice has upon them. From the start, it is hinted at that Beatrice is not all that she seems to be. She’s on the run from unsavoury elements of her past, and her presence in the community has the air of a long con to it. With her manipulative nature on display, her relationship with Adam is starkly depicted as predatory and calculated, unquestionably the actions of an abuser, allowing little ground for any confusion in the mind of the reader (this isn’t abuse presented as a love story). That clarity doesn’t extend to Adam, however, and his victimization — from grooming through to the aftermath — is handled realistically and heartbreakingly. The immorality of the relationship is never in question, but Adam carries the scars, and a lingering affection for Beatrice, for decades.
Not all the morality is quite so clear, though. The great strength of the book is not revealed until its final pages, when Babiak turns the knife one final time, upending not only the readers’ expectations, but their understanding of everything that has come before. It’s an understated, bravura moment, a grace note on a powerful, unsettling novel.