Scamping to thrills
The Hare
Melanie Finn Two Dollar Radio
Over the course of three novels, Melanie Finn has taken readers to settings as far-flung as picturesque Swiss towns and rural Tanzania. In her fourth, Finn mostly traps us in an uninsulated, mice-infested cabin in Northern Vermont. This is not a cheery book, but like those Vermont woods in winter, it shimmers with a stark loveliness.
Rosie (later Rose) Monroe, an orphan raised by a cold grandmother, gets a scholarship to study design in New York, and there meets Bennett — seductive, mysterious and 20 years older. He sweeps her into his life as the scion of a rich Connecticut family. Early on, this seems to be a cautionary tale about how a smart but naive young woman finds herself manipulated and mistreated by a man who is a thief, a drug dealer, maybe even a murderer.
Not long after Bennett takes Rosie and their infant daughter, Miranda, to that awful cabin, he deserts her to be closer to a perhaps-imaginary “teaching job.” Rosie, quiet and self-effacing, is forced to learn the way of the woods from her next-door neighbour, Billy, a tough, gruff woman with six howling hounds. Billy teaches Rose to stack wood, forage for edibles and shoot a buck, eventually freeing her from the submission that is women's lot: “Women do what needs to be done ... they do what is expected, the obligation of their gender.
For centuries, for thousands of years, tens of thousands, millions of years ... Women had holes and men believed it was their right to fill them. Not content with the physical holes, they tried to make existential ones.”
On her rare trips out of her narrow orbit, she marvels at how the rich live — as compared to her life of scrimping, always moments away from fiscal doom, where a major purchase is a new blouse on sale with its “merciless prison break lighting.”
In following her from her girlhood through middle age, Finn thrusts Rose in the path of practically every hot-button feminist issue: childhood sexual abuse, an abortion crisis, hot flashes and #Metoo, even a brush with gender reassignment surgery. By the time a serial killer is on the loose, the novel has metamorphosed into a gritty, fast-paced thriller.
For some readers, the novel's last third may contain a plot twist or two too many. But for the most part, Finn manages to make two seemingly contradictory impulses — the meditative character study and the densely plotted mystery — coexist. Finn is unafraid to address moral questions — what D.H. Lawrence might write, if he had lived in a world of Brett Kavanaugh hearings and secret child porn websites.