Trespass

by Valerie Martin

Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights . Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire, and finally, by Toby’s new girlfriend, a Croatian refugee named Salome Drago.
Raised in the Croatian expatriate community of New Orleans, Salome is a toxic mix of the old world and the intelligent, superstitious, sly, seductive, and confident. But Salome’s past is a mine of dangerous secrets, and the violence that destroyed her homeland is far from over. Chloe distrusts her on sight, and as Toby’s obsession with Salome grows, Chloe’s mistrust deepens, alienating her from her tolerant husband and besotted son. Rich with menace, the novel unfolds in a world where darkness intrudes into bright and pleasant places, a world with betrayal at its heart. In shimmering prose Valerie Martin raises the who shall inherit America?

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Contemporary, Novels, Adult Fiction, Family

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Valerie Martin is the author of nine novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). Martin’s last novel, The Confessions of Edward Day was a New York Times notable book for 2009.
A new novel The Ghost of the Mary Celeste is due from Nan Talese/Random House in January 2014, and a middle-grade book Anton and Cecil, Cats at Sea, co-written with Valerie’s niece Lisa Martin, will be out from Algonquin in October of 2013.
Valerie Martin has taught in writing programs at Mt. Holyoke College, Univ. of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. She resides in Dutchess County, New York and is currently Professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College.

Reviews

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not want this novel to end. Start to finish, the characters and their story were hard to put down. Simply put, people of our new, comfortable world become intimately involved with refugees from hell (which our country, in another context, imposes). Every character, and every conversation between them, is so real and revealing. Ms. Martin is simply a brilliant writer, as I have discovered in her other works. I am so glad that she is also fairly prolific, and writes books worth re-reading. I just finished my second reading of this one. The ordeal a Croatian character describes is a chilling reminder of how chaos permits hateful, bigoted people to behave monstrously, as many did in the latest Balkan war. Those people are here too, as we see lately, and more very day.

[E · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the best of Valerie Martin. This book seems a little muddled - does it want to be fiction about a family, a story about the ravages and aftermath of the war in Croatia, or mystery fiction? While much of the set-up of characters at the beginning and the tone would lend toward the latter, the book as a whole really revolves around in circles, playing some characters and relationships with ominous overtones that never are developed. In retrospect, the more I think about the ending, the more it bothers me. Was it necessary to kill off Chloe, the mother, the one who, in essence, is right to be suspicious of the daughter-in-law, whose fears are fulfilled, so that the other characters, who don't seem too terribly distraught by her death, can have happily wrapped up and rounded off endings? Is this a morality tale - if you are too suspicious and fearful of the intentions of others, if you want to protect or worry about your not-quite-grown son, you will die? I don't think she was treated fairly. And, please, Brendan and Salome's Mom end up together? Based on what?Kill off the too-affable, everything's cool, milquetoast Brendan instead of Chloe, and see if there can't be a more interesting, jagged, and real ending.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel had, in the abstract, very little plot, but was fully captivating--even almost a page-turner because I cared deeply what happened to the characters. In the plot, such as it was, a mother is troubled by her college-aged son's choice of a new girlfriend, while the father, a history professor who's struggling to find meaning in his work, tries to mediate. In a side story, the mother, an artist (specifically, a book illustrator who's working on illustrations for a new edition of Wuthering Heights) becomes obsessed with a poacher on their wooded acreage. The girlfriend's family history in the Balkans also adds considerable dramatic effect in the last half of the book. But it's the characters who are really memorable, along with their experience of war; there's a dramatic contrast between the Americans' comfortable protest of the buildup to the Iraq war and the girlfriends' family's direct experience of war. We're reminded that the 9/11 experience was NOT really all that life-changing for most Americans, as the experience of war usually is for most of the world.

[Cee Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first shot fired in this multi-layered novel about battlefields and victims, is over a basket of rolls in an expensive New York restaurant. Chloe Dale has met her beloved only son Toby's new girlfriend, and his girlfriend's first crime is being named Salome Drago, her second, being foreign. Despite identifying as a liberal, and despite her endless reserves of love and devotion Chloe has for her husband and son, the woman still cannot shake the itchy hand of upper class prejudice as she appraises her son's latest paramour. To Chloe, Salome is a snobby, snotty, humorless trespasser.

Chloe's life at home is no easier. As she works on painting book illustrations at home, her mind spins ceaselessly over the intrusion of Salome into their lives, and also upon the ever increasing presence of a rabbit poacher on her extensive property. Confronting this poacher unsettles Chloe as she realizes he is a foreignor. In her mind this man is Lebanese, and a stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorist in her backyard.

The story-line involving the unraveling of Chloe's life to intruders might have been more sympathetic if Chloe weren't so damned shrill, racist, and insufferable. Despite all of her war protests, and declarations of empathy for the downtrodden, Chloe's America has no room for fiery, war refugees whose fathers call themselves, "The Oyster King."

The Dale's as a family unit represent the very essence of placid, saturated, liberal America. Sweet tempered Toby's desicion to bring the ascerbic Salome into his family's life brings with it a massive shock, forcing them to face the realities of the underprivileged, and the sorts of social situations they attend rallies and marches to bring light to. The worst trials the Dale family has seen up to this point seems to be having to deal with Toby's string of girlfriends who always seem to be unacceptable or eccentric.

By contrast the lives of the Drago family span war, the loss of a mother, and a brother, and a resettling and rebirth in the bayous of Louisiana. They live hard , scraping an earning as Oyster farmers with Salome's ambitions for good education and a good career being the pride and joy of her doting father, Branko. Salome is a daddy's girl, and Branko warmly welcomes Toby into his heart as his daughter's intended.

It would be giving too much away to discuss the events that spiral this story on its head. Every single character is forced to face a shattered new reality in the second half of this book. The reader is taken from the safety of affluent, suburban America, and the ideals of college politics, into a world of genocide, war, and rape. No punch is pulled in the recounting of brutal warfare against women, but the scenes never lapse into gratuitous explicit description.

The final act of the story faltered, winding down to a completely expected conclusion that seemed tacked on hastily, and offered no variety to Chloe's character. I can forgive it, however, because the powerful scenes and characters along the way to the end left me moved, and startled. This book is definitely worth the time to read and absorb.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a sense this is an unsatisfying novel, in that the plot often doesn't seem to know where it's going, but it's so beautifully written and so full of interesting ideas that this hardly seems to matter. I found myself reading it almost as if it were a thriller -- I was that rapt.

Middle-aged book illustrator Chloe and history prof Brendan have a single son, Toby, of whom Chloe is overprotective. She's loathed all his girlfriends to date and in her opinion the latest, Salome, a Croat who came to the US in childhood when her family fled the carnage as Yugoslavia dissolved, is by far the worst. We get the impression that Chloe feels in fact sexually threatened by the sultry Salome, especially since she draws (no pun intended) a parallel in her mind between the "trespassing" Salome and the wildly sexual outsider Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights, the book that she's currently illustrating. Meanwhile, although Salome's fisherman father Branko welcomes Toby as a son, her violent brother Andro regards him with hostility.

During the night of the day that Toby and Salome wed, she deserts him, promising to return once she has sorted something out. That something is her discovery that the mother whom she had always believed was dead, Jelena, is in fact still alive . . .

That's about as much as I can tell without giving away far more than I want to. In the second part of the book we meet Jelena, who's in many ways as captivating and potentially divisive a character as Salome, and we're presented with some of her recollections of the hell she went through in Croatia at the hands -- and worse -- of the Serbs. These passages are pretty grueling to read, especially as they ring very true.

A very readable, very enthralling novel. Highly recommended, unless you require your plots to be all neatly tied up at the end.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Multi-layered story that raises many complex issues, including the question of 'foreignness,' and the fascination and fear that the 'outsider' can inspire. I esp enjoyed how this theme is drawn out with the art one of the characters is creating for an illustrated edition of "Wuthering Heights."

It starts off a bit slow (which didn't bother me), but very quickly becomes hard to put down. And while it may seem that the ending is all tied up in pretty bows for the characters (at times I wasn't sure that I liked where it was going even as I saw it heading there), ultimately I don't believe it is. Yes, some of the characters have 'plans' for the rest of their lives that they speak of confidently (with hope and planning, they are able to continue on), but certainly some of these spoken-of plans will go awry just as earlier plans for themselves and their loved ones did.

I am impressed at how different all of Martin's novels are from each other.

[Nette · Rating 2 out of 5]

She's a good writer but I hated every single character, so I pretty much skimmed this one. Also, it contained entire chapters in &%$ing italics. Chapters! I'm not reading 13 pages of italics! I'm old, and I need to save my eyeballs.

If you want to tell a story from an another character's POV, and you want to make that clear, just call the chapter something like "Listen UP! Now It's That Croat Chick Talking!"

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though published 17 years ago, this novel still feels prescient on the theme of a certain American attitude towards foreigners. It's a tight domestic drama, with a larger socio-political canvas remit. It begins when Toby, a junior at NYU, introduces his mother Chloe to his new girlfriend, the intense Salome. While Toby, the only child of Chloe, a book illustrator, and Brendan, a tenured history professor writing a book about the crusades, grew up comfortably in lovely surroundings - a house outside Manhattan with acreage and a forest - Salome, a scholarship student at NYU, immigrated with her father and older brother to Louisiana after the deaths of her mother and younger brother during the war between Serbia and Croatia. Both young people are politically inclined. The frisson between Toby and Salome is clear but Chloe sees aspects of Salome that she knows Toby is missing - that Salome is the one with control in the relationship, has her eyes on Toby as a prize, wants to trap him, wants whatever he (or his parents) might have. She seems humorless to Chloe, uninterested in polite discourse, constantly challenging. The threat Chloe feels from Salome is not the only threat in her world, there is also a poacher who for the past few years has been killing rabbits on their land, they hear the reports of the shotgun, and when Chloe finally comes face to face with him, the man seems not to understand English, does not understand when she says he's not allowed to do what he's doing, and, perhaps connected or not, the severed head of a rabbit ends up at the door to her studio. A sense of menace runs through the book, from inside and from outside. Chloe and Brendan are liberal, political, they attend rallies and marches, and Chloe's attitude towards Salome bothers both Brendan, who understands his son's attraction to the intense and shapely wild-haired young woman, and angers Toby, who pulls away from his mother in pique, even as he has certain concerns of his own about Salome, that she is unknowable even as he wants to know everything about her. When the young couple ask his parents for a loan so they can move in together, and then announce that Salome is pregnant, Chloe's fears about her seem confirmed. And when Salome disappears immediately after she marries Toby, and finally informs Toby that she's in Trieste, Brendan and Toby follow her, a trip that extends to weeks, as Chloe remains at home, illustrating a new edition of Wuthering Heights, surrounded by snow, with the poacher on her land, seeing the photos her husband sends of himself, Toby, Salome, and more. Tautly written and intriguing throughout.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an odd book—I agree with others here that it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. There were parts I enjoyed, and I was curious about what would happen to the characters—but over all, I’m not sure what it was about. And not in an interesting way.

[Ellie Wakefield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn’t make the strongest impression on me, but I really enjoyed the writing and it raised some interesting points about geographical and emotional territory.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

Critics hail Trespass as a "stunning" work (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), with the potential to introduce Valerie Martin (best known for her 2001 novel Mary Reilly) to a wider audience. The novel combines the drama of family relationships with larger themes of xenophobia, war, and genocide; it also juxtaposes the comfort of the American middle class with the horrors suffered by victims of ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world. Although a couple of reviewers found the plot forced at times, most praised Martin for her achievement. Brilliant writing, deftly-drawn characters, and a refusal to provide easy answers make this thought-provoking work a pleasure to read.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was strange but very engaging. Just prior to Desert Storm, an American family gets caught up in the aftermath of Croatian survivors after the war with Serbs in Yugoslavia. The Croatian mother's story of her past is intermingled with the present as mother and daughter are reunited with unexpected consequences for the Americans. There is an underlying motif of WUTHERING HEIGHTS since the American mother Chloe is working on illustrations for a reprinting of the novel. With a different twist, she describes Heathcliff thus: "He wants to get even with those who took him in and failed to love him.... He's something new: the vengeful orphan, the ungrateful outsider, the coming retribution of the great underclass." This seems to be a prediction for the world's future.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book sounded interesting but as I read it, it never really went anywhere. It's basically about a mother and a daughter-in-law that don't really like each other. But, they spend little time together. In fact, the characters often spend the book lost in their own thoughts about each other instead of actually interacting, so the dramatic tension is a little mushy. Also, the resolution is, not quite cliche, but kinda pedestrian and too easy.

[Krystn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Jessica Woofter · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75
I read Valerie Martin's book "Property" while staying in a hostel in Turkey in 2005. Reading a book about American slavery while in Turkey was a very strange juxtaposition, but I remember really liking it.
Trespass is very different. The book felt a little disjointed -- dipping into subjects as varied as the Iraq war, the civil war in Yugoslavia, generational trauma, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships, mother-son relationships, art, and poaching. It jumped around a lot, and there were some parts that felt a little superfluous. I wish that Martin would have spent more time on the relationship between Chloe and Salome, and the allusions to the Iraq War seemed like they weren't necessary. When the flashbacks to Croatia started I thought that I wouldn't like that part, but those ended up being a part of the story that I really enjoyed.
Maybe what I got most out of this book was how much I was drawn to Chloe's life as an artist. I loved the sections that went into her process for creating the illustrations for Wuthering Heights and I covet her studio. All the other parts of Chloe were pretty terrible -- I only have daughters so I don't really understand the toxic, petty reactions she has to all of her son's significant others. Her interactions with Salome were pretty cringe-worthy.
I was mostly on the Toby's side, but I also thought he was pretty immature and entitled to expect his parents to foot the bill for his romantic wanderings. That also made me cringe.
I liked this a lot -- almost a 4. I would definitely read more by Martin.
Passages that I marked:

"It interests Brendan how many different ways there are for young women to be neurotic and difficult. Boys are largely good or bad. "Bad boys" hate authority, of any kind, straight out. No starvation or self-mutilation is necessary to make the case that they don't fit in."

"In fact, Toby has a fair idea of exactly what his parents are worth, and how much has already been invested in his expensive education. He isn't ungrateful, but given who they are, and what they value, it would have been out of character for them to do otherwise. He understands that his self-sufficiency, both moral and financial, is the hoped for return on this investment, and he's not unwilling to gratify that expectation. But as an ideal, self-sufficiency isn't irresistibly compelling. It makes no allowance for passion."

"Our fate is ever to rush into the past as if we thought it was the future."

[AnonymousReaderPerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a drama about a bunch of ordinary people that hits all the right emotional notes. To me, that seems hard to do when your characters aren't cops, or criminals, or aliens, or soldiers, etc. (This is another way of saying I just don't get the Romance genre. :) )

Not only that, it interweaves compelling stories and backgrounds for each character, and the way they intersect really drives home the "everyman/everywoman" feeling. This is what happens in real life, people's lives intertwine and create these unions and conflicts and resolutions that almost seem like chemical reactions.

The one knock is that it starts kind of slow. Which might be inevitable for the kind of story that I just spent two paragraphs praising. But the author does a great job of creating believable and complex characters in relatively few pages. This has the feel of something that had a lot of info cut from the first draft, stuff that ultimately built the character depth needed to fuel this story. If I'm right on that, that cut material was well worth the sweat. If I'm not, then the author just has a talent for crafting good characters with comparatively little effort. Praiseworthy either way.

[Jody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reality-based fiction. I enjoyed it. A young college couple gets pregnant and decide to marry. The son's mother tells him the girl is trying to trap him and ruin his life, that he doesn't know anything about her and he's an idiot to marry her, and this was maybe the most interesting thing to me. I didn't expect a nonreligious, anti-Bush artist married to a college professor living on the East Coast to react this way. It got me thinking, how would I react? Answer: Probably much the same.
There is also a poacher who hunts rabbits on their land and I can't figure out how he contributes to the story unless it's to show more of the mother's personality. She passes his picture around at a party, talks to the sheriff and finally gets him fired. He's an immigrant and so is the son's girlfriend. Is she prejudiced?
It got me thinking that I view most people through a filter....a filthy political filter. I assume this mom is a liberal and therefore shouldn't think or act the way she does.
People are people, man. For better or worse. Fuck politics.

[Allyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for the first time on December 8, 2007 before I had joined Goodreads. So I don't know what my first impression was, but I did record the title with the date in a small notebook reserved for favorite books.
This is quite a story, but at times felt too contrived or managed for me to develop a strong connection with her characters and believe it all in the moment.
During the reading of it, I was completely submerged but now just having finished it, many details seemed unnecessary or odd or just a little too much. And I wonder how I will feel about it tomorrow. She is a talented storyteller and the war experiences as recounted by Jelena are horrifying and believable, sadly.
I dislike my paperback cover but am happy to have found this copy in a used bookstore so I could revisit this book 15 years later.

[Denise Jarrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am really enjoying books by Valerie Martin at the moment  - modern relatable stories with so much historical  background. Trespass is set in America and Trieste before and during the gulf war. Toby is a middle class white American student, very much indulged by his parents. His mother adores him but doesn't like his Croatian girlfriend, Salome whose refugee father is a poor boatman and whose mother was killed in the war with Serbia. When Salome goes in search of what happened, we learn about the horrific past of her mother, while her father and Toby's mother struggle to come to terms with what it means for the present.
Valerie Martin won the Orange Prize for this and rightly so. The book is well written, engaging and very relevant.  I like the fact that not everything is resolved, as life is like that but there is some acceptance.

[pdxmaven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in 2007 and read now again, though I don’t recall any of it from before :- ( Interesting interweaving of the husband/father Brendan’s work as a history professor, immersed in writing a book about the crusades and how his own history and the mother of his daughter-in-law become intertwined. Meanwhile, his wife is focused on illustrating a new edition of Wuthering Heights (the myriad details of which I found tiresome, but I am not a fan of Emily Bronte), when she is not focused on a man who is (apparently) shooting/poaching in their adjacent woods. And the son is besotted with a Croatian immigrant. (appreciated another view of that conflict, from a [fictional] survivor.

[Barbara Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting plot, weaving connections between areas of conflict or war, seen from the viewpoint of those involved directly and those observing from the outside. It mainly features the Croatian/Serbian conflict and refugees who fled to America, looking back from the point in time, where the U.S. is moving troops into Iraq. While I enjoyed it, it would have had an extra star if the characters had been drawn more deeply. I found it very difficult to empathise, even with those who had suffered deeply on both a physical and psychological level.

[Al Ornaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked reading it, it is an easy read in the sense that it is well-structured, there's always something happening and I felt the characters, especially their interactions well-described and engaging. But paradoxically, it felt a little bit rushed as if all this couldn't have happened in such a time frame. I'd say that if written a century earlier, this novel would've had 100 pages more to develop both characters and relationships so that the tilting point could have come in a more understandable yet surprising way. And I would have given it a four star.

[Ellen Mays · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a 4? I’ll see how it sticks with me. It was a captivating read, couldn’t wait to see what the story held. But it was dark, and painful. I know little of the war that affected Salome and her family, showing my ignorance of the former Yugoslavia and the relatively recent atrocities during this time. All war is atrocious. Hearing stories of survivors is heartbreaking, as you realize the sacrifices they’ve made to save themselves, or to save others. The people in this book are believable and devoted and hopeful, and I’ll miss them.

[Dm32blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down one of the best books I've read this year... maybe even in years! An excellent story and one of the best contemporary lit novels I've read. It was written so well and the characters were so well developed and portrayed. The dialogue was fantastic with a great rhythm, so much so that I could picture each scene as if it were a movie. I feel Brendan as Greg Kinnear and Toby as Joseph Gordon Lovett at the relative age of the character. The subject matter was so gripping, the tension was compelling. I loved this novel! Highly, highly recommend!!

[Karen Sofarin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex and riveting. Enjoyed the richly drawn characters and the interlocking stories. Really enjoyed this relatively short but compelling novel. I have a soft spot for Yugoslavian stories and other people who read Slovenia Drakulic. Would like to read more novels by Valerie Martin.

[dead letter office · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy or uplifting read, but Valerie Martin is one of my favorites. I'm working my way steadily through her back catalog. I don't understand how John Irving and John Updike are considered great writers, while Valerie Martin is relatively unknown.

[Kathleen Bicat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book about two very different families whose lives become entwined. One middle class academic American family and the other survivors of the Serbian-Croatian War. Revealing about the horrors of war and its aftermath

[Carolyn Feltus-atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh, it didn’t really grab me.

[Barbara Gard]

didn't like

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars