Book Review: Through the Pale Door

Brian Ray’s debut novel Through the Pale Door is, at its core, a story about loss. In fact, it might even be fair to say that the novel is something of a treatise on different kinds of loss. Within the confines of its scant 203 pages lies the loss of innocence, the loss of sanity, the loss of life, the loss of faith, the loss of love, and the loss of control. So much is lost in the book, that the pastel-colored cover, with its mural of two adolescent lovers embracing, seems to hint ironically at more light-hearted coming of age story, a story that might have been but because of circumstances beyond the author’s control, thankfully wasn’t.

If you’re looking for a story of two young lovers meeting and falling in love at that pivotal time in a person’s life when the future is about overwhelming possibilities, a time before the world has taken its toll, that story is here, though not in the way you would expect. Darkly funny in places, and dreadfully serious in others, Through the Pale Door feels like a story tied not so much to a place—as is the case with so many Southern writers—but more to a frame of mind. For the story it tells, that’s certainly not a bad thing.

The story takes place during the summer after the main character of the novel, eighteen-year-old Sarah West, graduates high-school. Sarah is an artist living in Marietta, Georgia on her way to college at Emory, and like many college-bound teens she takes a job to make some extra money during the summer. But where most of the college-bound set would be taking jobs at Aeropostale, Sarah takes a job at the steel mill her father manages, three hours away in Columbia, South Carolina. For Sarah, taking the job means leaving her clinically insane, mother—whose milder eccentricities manifest themselves in her macabre paintings of various different ways to die in a steel mill—to live with her emotionally stunted, workaholic father.

Soon after she starts her new job, Sarah meets and starts falling for a fellow steel-mill worker, and clandestine muralist, named Edgewood. Theirs is the sort of clumsy love that only the young can feel, and Ray captures that feeling quite well in their awkward dialog with each other.

Edgewood is an aimless kid of sorts with an interest in—bordering on obsession with—the murals of the great Mexican master Jose Clemente Orozco. Though he claims to be working at the mill to save for art college, Ray’s treatment of the character leads the reader to believe that, left to his own devices, Edgewood would either float on to the next place or stay in the mill forever, painting his working-class masterpieces at night free from the judgment of the art world.

Soon after Sarah and Edgewood meet, Sarah’s psychotic mother, Monday West, dies in a car accident and the from there the novel takes a decidedly darker turn.

Coming to terms with the death of her mother comes in the form of a cathartic reliving of all the stories that accompany an adolescence spent dealing with the realities of a parent who has lost grip on reality. The passages dealing with Sarah’s mother are the most powerful and memorable parts of the book. One passage reads:

I’d read about the howls of wolves. When people go camping and her wolves howl, the book said, they often think they’re listening to a whole pack. In reality, they’re probably hearing a single wolf. Studies on the vocal chords of wolves have revealed highly structured chambers that gave them a rich harmonic sound. The book referred to the sounds as “beautiful” and “haunting.” That’s why I stayed in the room. And it’s probably why my dad stayed. On a good night, my mom could sound like five or six wolves.

Compelling descriptions like that run throughout the portions of the book where Sarah remembers her mother, and lend the novel a sort of unexpected depth.

Sarah’s vivid remembrances of her mother’s bouts with insanity are only highlighted by her father’s inability to deal with anything that can’t have some sort of external value placed on it. Divorced from his wife for about a year at the start of the story, Martin West is the sort of guy whose entire life is consumed with his profession. For all intents and purposes, he is the steel mill, or at least as close to it as a presumably living, breathing human being can be.

Not to say that he doesn’t mean well, but he’s just not capable of dealing with the realities around him in anything other than a “brick and mortar” sort of way. He wants to be there for his daughter it seems, but he’s not sure how. He occasionally does things that seem unbelievably crass, but they’re not done out of malice. He just doesn’t understand much of the world outside his mill, and that becomes all the more apparent in the way he deals with—or doesn’t deal with—his daughter’s feelings on her mother’s death.

The book is quite good, and shows a maturity in the storytelling not usually present in a first novel. Overall, I highly recommend it. That recommendation doesn’t come without a few caveats though.

First, while the descriptions of Monday’s psychotic episodes, and all the memories of Sarah’s adolescence are vividly described and fleshed out, the descriptions of the present in the novel sometimes lack that sort of detail and depth. The mill scenes are particularly disappointing. Though there’s a sort of general overview given, the steel mill setting never really takes on a life of its own. Often the scenes that happen in the mill feel as though they could’ve happened anywhere, and descriptions of sparking acetylene torches, welding arcs, and molten steel feel sort of incidental, lacking the impact of some of the novel’s other settings.

Also, without giving anything away, there are two character deaths in this novel. One of them is really the impetus behind the entire story, moving the novel through it’s most profound and rewarding parts. The other death feels like a cheap way of getting a character out of the way instead of taking the more difficult route of accomplishing the same thing by writing the character out in a different way. To me, this would’ve made for a more interesting—if ultimately longer—novel. Either way, the character’s death wasn’t needed, and in fact took away in some respects, from the larger theme of the novel.

Still, while those two things make the novel a tad uneven at times, Through the Pale Door is still very much a worthwhile read. The prose is beautiful at times, and moves in a rhythm that feels much smoother than most young novelists’ first offerings usually do. Brian Ray clearly loves telling the story, and that comes through in the novel’s better moments. If Through the Pale Door is a sign of things to come later in Ray’s budding career, we can expect some true gems from this talented young writer.