Jessica Van Orden

“I was wrong, it isn’t a tragedy at all.” (275)

-Susan Buttenwieser, Junction of Earth and Sky

What might be heavier than the inheritance of a father’s sins? The mother’s sorrow. Woven with an intimate lyricism, Susan Buttenwieser’s debut novel Junction of Earth and Sky , picks the jagged edges of one family’s experience to ask the question, what is more vulnerable than living?

At merely fifteen, Alice grasps tightly to everything she could hope for, having found family again with Auntie, Lou, and Pearl, after the loss of her mother, and the early spark of young love with a neighborhood boy, Danny. However, her security is shaken with the mounting instability of a World War II England and a single act may reduce it all to tragedy, if not for a second chance.

Meanwhile, across terrain and time, Alice’s granddaughter, Marnie—too-tired to fight against life’s disappointments and living out of her boyfriend, Jimmy’s, retired Chevy Nova—acts as a drug-runner along the eastern coastline, all the while chasing any avenue that might promise her peace after a great loss: no matter the cost. Yet, it seems only hindsight may grant her that, as we are invited into the tough but beloved memories of her childhood time and again. 

It is a tough feat, attempting to discuss trauma. It is even an even greater one to focus your lens on family—on how we inherit it from those who are meant to nurture us. And yet, with precision, in a stained-glass solder, Buttenwieser crafts characters who grieve for their destruction even as they fight to bring themselves back together. The characters in Junction of Earth and Sky  are arresting, whittled away by rash decisions and quickening pity, but then shaped by inclusions of hindsight and self-awareness that engenders empathy from their reader, even for the darkest of grey characters, like Sonny. Sonny is many things that make him hard to swallow—absent, abusive, alcoholic—yet still, Junction of Earth and Sky  begs its reader to remember the reality of him:

“THE BRIEF MOMENT WHEN Sonny first wakes up is the only good moment of his entire day.
That very beginning of coming into consciousness … There is only a small window of time
left to linger … His past, his regrets, his dreams, his stories invisible, …” (251)

Why take this moment for a character who has done so much wrong? Because of the deeper conversation at play here surrounding trauma and its impact. He suffers his choices, but he is not the sum of them, and in taking this moment with Sonny at the close of the novel, Buttenwieser ensures that readers consider him a moment beyond son of Alice and father of Marnie, but as a man with his own trauma.

In many ways, Buttenwieser has paralleled her characters experiences with the landscape of a restored England, described by Alice to Marnie upon returning to Spithandle decades after the war:

“You’d never know there’d ever been a war, she says. That it’d been bombed. You have to
look really carefully to see the evidence. But it’s definitely there.’ Alice went on to explain
that the remnants of the war were really obvious in the big cities like London, where there
are new developments in places that had been badly bombed, right next to buildings
dating back hundreds of years that hadn’t been touched. ‘But it’s more hidden in places
like Spithandle,’ Alice said. ‘You know – more like hidden scars, invisible wounds.’” (222).

Buttenwieser’s construction of language is brilliantly employed throughout the novel to say more than it does superficially. Take the consideration of trauma as such as restoration—the difference between wounds and scars. Many of her characters work in similar ways, bleeding onto other characters with open wounds and not realizing how they stain the other for it. Yet, even when they fall, Buttenwieser weaves in heartwrenching moments that do not allow her audiences to reduce the character to a single action or concept. We are continually reminded of their humanity, and for it, we are not interested in giving up on them just yet.

And they are not ready to give up on themselves. Some do see the stains they leave, they just haven’t figured out how to staunch the bleeding: and I ask, what is more human than that? Denise is one apt example of this battle Buttenwieser’s Junction of Earth and Sky  approaches. A survivor of domestic abuse and young mother, Denise spends a majority of the novel torn between a want of her freedom and a need of affection.  She can never seem to do the ‘right thing,’ fanning fires between her sister-in-law and stepping on Alice’s tidy toes, but desperately craving someone to just “be happy for [her].” In one scene, sharing a rare moment of joy at a Red Sox’s game, an inebriated Denise and Marnie leave at the close:

“Denise gathers her daughter in her arms, stumbling for a second when she stands up
and almost drops her, before regaining her balance. ‘I got you, Marn, I got you.’” (89)

In her, Buttenwieser wields language in layers, stoking the tension of instability early on, “stumbling … almost drop[ping]” Marnie, but all the while underscoring the small joy she finds in motherhood by having Marnie. We can feel her desire to find that balance between what she wants and what others need of her, and by walking with her through her trauma (held and passed down) we grow in empathy, even when she stumbles.

Thus, the characters are a true gem in this novel. They live, not as the backbone of the novel—drawing this reader forward for fear of leaving them on Buttenwieser’s cliffs—but the beating heart by which I came to understand my own family’s inheritances.

In a beautifully braided narrative, Buttenwieser travels two lives and six decades, underscoring the burden of personal and generational trauma to demonstrate what power the ties of family may yet possess in bearing us through it.