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Review of C.W. Smith's Steplings
Steplings. By C.W. Smith. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian
University Press, 2011. $32.95.
When nineteen-year-old Jason Sanborn muses about what he
terms the "hocus-pocus business" of life after death, he finds
it all, as he says, "pretty hard to swallow." Thinking about his
dead mother, he wonders i f " . . . people really drift up into the
stars like flaming chaff from a bonfire when they die?" Jason
is the protagonist in C.W. Smith's latest novel Steplings, and,
as the title suggests, Steplings is about the complex
relationships of an American blended family, brought
together by death and remarriage, sustained by a tenacity
tempered with grace and grit. At the heart of the novel is a
rare examination of the multifaceted relationship between two
step-siblings, Jason and eleven-year-old Emily. Exploring the
intricacies of family life is not new ground for Smith, whose
finely written previous novels include Thin Men of Haddam,
Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, Buffalo Nickel,
Hunter's Trap, Understanding Women, Gabriel's Eye, and
Purple Hearts. In Steplings, Smith makes a foray into a
situation that, as he has said, gives us a love story in a
"cultural context," part of that context being the Iraq war, part
of it being twenty-first century parenting.
The novel's opening scene takes place at the Mesquite,
Texas, home of the Sanborn family, comprised not only of
Jason and Emily but also their parents, Burl, Jason's father,
and Lily, Emily's mother. The family has been constructed
hastily, or so it still seems to Jason, who two years ago lost
his mother to cancer, then watched Burl spiral into alcohol
addiction. Burl has met Lily in AA, and in a short time, the
two have married, combining their lives and their only
children to forge a new family of four. Jason is at loose ends
and without direction when his father remarries. He has
dropped out of high school two months before graduation,
after his over-achieving girlfriend Lisa departs for college,
ending their relationship; as she puts it in her letter to him,
"we each need to grow." He finds his new stepsister diffident,
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difficult, and, most of all, too young to relate to as a sister;
instead, she is a "Supernerd" in pigtails and glasses.
From the outset there are fissures in the foundation of
this ready-made family, wounds that haven't healed for
instance, as well as emotional distance, even, as it transpires,
between husband and wife, Burl and Lily. Jason is a troubled
young man. Confused, cast adrift, he and his father talk at,
around, and through each other, but at the novel's outset
neither can effectively talk to the other. Even worse, at the
beginning of the novel, Jason is facing an impending court
date, having been accused of assault following a foolish
mistake at Lisa's graduation party. Emily, meanwhile, is at an
awkward age. Has there ever been a more challenging time to
be a young girl than the early twenty-first century? Emily is
often sarcastic and sharp-tongued. The difference in Jason's
and Emily's ages is one divide. Another, more substantial
divide, is that smart, gifted Emily feels she has been
consigned to a terrible fate living in small-town Mesquite,
Texas, with Lily and Burl and Jason, and not where she
would rather be, with her academically minded father, a
professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Smith
succinctly sums up Emily's feelings about her new life: "She
hated the house, the town, her stupid school especially, it was
full of redneck ignoramuses, and Jason's dad was always mad
at her and her mother always took his side—"
After Lisa writes him a Dear John letter, Jason decides
to hitchhike to Austin. Lisa is, at this moment in his life, his
lodestone. Emily has her own reason for wanting to travel to
Austin: the desire to see her father. She wants a different life,
the ideal life she imagines she would live with her father, a
dream any young child of divorce might have, life with the
"other" parent, free of rules, of the mundane stuff of daily
life. She convinces Jason to let her accompany him to Austin.
Jason reluctantly agrees.
What follows is a novel of journey, an Odyssey of sorts as
Jason and Emily, reluctant comrades and companions, travel
through one small Texas town after another—Mesquite, Gun
Barrel City, Corsicana, Waco. Here Smith, Dedman Family
Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University,
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knows whereof he speaks. His is an accurate portrait of smalltown and suburban Texas—the webbed interstices of
interstates and county roads, the Dairy Queens, the roadside
parks. At several points in their journey, Jason and Emily
encounter fellow travelers. The most vivid, evocative
encounter is with two African refugees (we are not told what
country in Africa), Jacob and Emmanuel, who are traveling to
Houston in "an old blue Ford Econoline van, one headlight
cocked slightly outward like a lazy eye, right front fender
sporting a dent the size and shape of a football." Brought to
America by church groups, Jacob and Emmanuel are travelers
far further afield than Jason and Emily, from across the world,
enduring more hardships and struggles than white, culturally
and economically insular Jason and Emily have ever known.
Their stories of life in refugee camps and the shock of coming
to America are riveting to Jason, especially the pure, simple
novelty of experiencing something as quotidian as a
supermarket for the first time.
"And oh, my friend—" Emmanuel shook his head.
"You must see through the eyes of a boy who has never
been inside the American supermarket to understand
how such a thing can make you tremble. It is like an
ocean when you are dying of thirst. All around, food,
food, food! You do not know how to choose one thing
or the other. It takes many years to learn."
The conversation captures the haunting essence of their
immigrant experience and sharply contrasts their journey with
that of Jason and Emily. Jason sees this encounter as a brush
with "real life" and is far more impressed by the possibility of
writing a song about the encounter than considering the
suffering of Jacob and Emmanuel and understanding that this
isn't just a gritty anecdote fashioned for his benefit. On the
other hand, Emily seems untouched by the encounter. Blase
as only the very young can sometimes be, she's also very
much a product of her time, where "real life" exists by and
large online. She's seen a documentary at school about The
Lost Boys of the Sudan. " I bet that Jacob and Emmanuel even
know some of them. Maybe they were even in the movie. It's
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still all going on over there. It's genocide now. Even
President Bush said so. You can go online and read all about
it." Then she proceeds to focus on eating a granola bar, the
momentary brush with tragedy and death forgotten.
Smith has created rich, complex characters in the
guises of his two young protagonists. It is rare for a writer to
capture so keenly and so accurately the everyday thoughts
and speech of young characters and temper them so well with
moments of soul-searching revelation. Smith has also created
a wonderfully complex character in Burl, a man seeking his
son's approval yet at a loss as to how to forge a relationship
with this young man who is making a painful transition to
adulthood. The novel's strongest sections feature Jason and
Emily as they journey to and then around Austin. Smith
juxtaposes these sections with chapters featuring Burl and
Lily, who are increasingly at odds as tensions mount between
them. Emily assures Jason she has left a note for her mother
explaining her decision to accompany Jason to Austin so she
can see her father. The trouble is, as Jason discovers, she has
lied about the note, and her lie has dangerous consequences.
When Lily reports Emily's disappearance as a kidnapping, the
police issue an Amber Alert. From this point the novel's
tension builds steadily, no longer only about the journey, but
about Jason evading a potentially serious scrape with the law.
A less engaging character initially is Lisa, enjoying her
freshman year at the University of Texas with new friends
and newfound freedom. Scenes between Lisa and her friends
lack the urgency or complexity of those between Jason and
Emily or Burl and Lily. However, once Jason encounters Lisa
in Austin, Lisa immediately becomes more accessible. She
and Jason share a finely written scene in which Lisa forces
Jason to confront the consequences of his actions. Jason has
been so busy casting himself as a victim he's never stopped to
consider others he has hurt. His confrontation with Lisa
provides a pivotal moment in his moral and emotional
growth; it is the moment at which another, a more potent and
viable, journey begins. Once Jason and Emily return home
and the Amber Alert is cancelled, the time for Jason to
salvage and re-direct his life begins. Smith handles this
genesis deftly in a beautifully written scene in which Jason
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attempts to make amends for an accident, a long-overdue
apology crafted in note-perfect dialogue.
Taking place in 2001, the backdrop of Steplings is the
Iraq war, and the novel's conclusion is unafraid of tackling
social issues on a fine, intimate scale. Smith draws his
characters even closer to world events as Jason enlists in the
military. Soon he will experience the "real life" of war first
hand. We can't help but be amazed at his journey, and we
can't help but feel torn between admiration and concern as
walks out of his home in Mesquite and into an uncertain
future.
Steplings is a richly detailed, complex novel. It is filled
with issues of social and personal conscience, inhabited by
characters a lot like us: people needing and seeking meaning
in a broken, fragile world, people always on an odyssey of
one sort or another. Steplings is deceptively quiet at times,
subtly and wisely offering several contradictory yet valid
perspectives to eternal verities and conflicts within a dense
yet accessible prose style. Granted, Smith has given us
characters to identify with but, more importantly, he has
given us characters to remember.
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