“Wyoming,” Charlotte Bacon writes, “made you feel
that an articulated reason to stay was a good thing to develop.” In
Bacon’s new novel, Split Estate, that nebulous
feeling drives Arthur King to leave New York City with his two
teenagers, Cam and Celia, after his wife, Laura, commits suicide.
He rashly moves the family west to his mother Lucy’s Wyoming ranch.
During their first months in the town of Callendar, each
King behaves recklessly – as Lucy puts it, each is “a streak of
need.” Shy, awkward Celia pines for a taciturn, unavailable ranch
hand. Cam, her handsome, moody older brother, dates the duplicitous
daughter of his ruthless boss. Arthur has two scandalous trysts.
Even Lucy scrawls graffiti poetry onto mining equipment, daring the
sheriff, an ex-boyfriend, to arrest her. All of this should limit
the Kings’ staying power in Wyoming, but in Split
Estate, they get out of jail free.
The move to
Wyoming, desperate but not hopeless, offers the family some needed
distance and perspective. Celia, whose annoying obsessions
underscore a longing for order, has a weak grip on reality. She
experiences instances of “clairvoyance” (usually at crucial plot
points), but even for her, Wyoming is solid and stunning, the
honest opposite of Manhattan. Her brother, the most accessible
character and the one most shaken by Laura’s suicide, acclimates
best: “Cam had found a place where he could manage, and he wasn’t
going to give that up. It was too important. He was still on the
side that chose the daily smack of feet on a cold floor, a cup of
hot coffee, a girl’s warm body. These things still mattered to him.
He had woken up to the mattering this summer, when he thought it
was lost to him.”
Lucy believes
“suicides persisted with a spectral intensity, as if they might be
glimpsed in the corners of rooms, among roof beams, in little-used
hallways.” Laura’s sadness lingers long after her death. Her jump
claims the book’s characters invisibly, splitting their emotional
state between past and present as decisively as mineral rights and
surface rights are split by law on ranchland.
As Annie
Proulx wrote in the short story “Brokeback Mountain:” “If you can’t
fix it you’ve got to stand it.” Split Estate
falls short because its characters don’t stand it quite long
enough.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Reasons to stay.
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