Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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The lifelessness on her son's face is what finally forces Fran Benedetto to turn herself into Elizabeth Crenshaw and escape, with her son, from her abusive husband. Fran, the protagonist of Anna Quindlen's new novel Black and Blue, has temporarily fled to her sister's house for shelter after Bobby has beaten her badly enough to break her nose and turn her face all sorts of yellows and reds. Yet with a coercive decoction of wheedling and contempt, Bobby has persuaded her to return home. As Bobby breaks down her resistance, Fran glances at her husband's namesake, the young Robert. "The look on his face was nothing, nothing at all, the look he might have if he were watching a boring movie on television or playing with his food at the dinner table." Realizing that her constant complicity in her husband's ever more brutal attacks has effectively muffled the healthy terror of a ten-year-old, she dyes her hair, obtains false papers, takes Robert, and leaves.

One wonders when (and whether) Fran would have fled if she hadn't had the impetus of her son's watchful presence. Quindlen's portrait is of a woman whose love for her son far surpasses her instincts for self-preservation. Later, when Fran and Robert have relocated to Florida, she wakes to hear her son on the phone to his father, talking about sports and school. Yet she opts to stay where her son has built up friends rather than to move a second time, the option proffered by the women's help organization that has masterminded this initial escape.

Black and Blue's strength lies (as in Quindlen's other novels) in the compelling details that make Fran emotionally real. "I even started using a soft toothbrush so I wouldn't have to taste blood in my mouth more often than I already did. How do you tell that to a kid who loves his dad?" As we watch Fran, now Beth Crenshaw, begin to establish her new life, these minutiae are a constant reminder of how much she had relinquished in order to stay with Bobby, and how much she must give up in order to leave him.

With such an emphasis on the taut story of Fran's survival and on her own emotional depths, Black and Blue weakens where Quindlen stoops to using stock characters. For the rebuilding of Fran's love life, the path is glaringly obvious: Robert's vice-principal and soccer coach Mike Riordan is the only available adult male in Fran's, or rather Beth's, life. As her new friend Cindy Roerbacker remarks presciently, "I can tell you that on TV the soccer coach and the player's lovely single mother wind up together." Cindy herself is more vivid and full, which makes Mike seem all the more painfully non-descript by comparison.

Oprah Winfrey recently chose this novel for her book club, perhaps forcing on the highbrow reader a few questions about its mass popularity versus its integrity as an intelligent book. Black and Blue is, however, a good choice: though not a complex story, its simply voiced narration delves deep into wrenching human emotions. While it perhaps pulls a little too plaintively at one's heartstrings, and certainly lacks some of the insight of One True Thing (which followed a young woman accused of helping her cancer-ridden mother die), it is nonetheless a powerful depiction of a woman's love for her husband and her son, and the conflicting directions in which that love pulls.