Rosellen Brown\'s Novel Before and After Deals

¶ … Rosellen Brown's novel Before and After deals with the traumatic reverberations of a possible murder in a small town, and especially on the family of the primary suspect. As police search for Jacob Reiser in connection with the death of his girlfriend, his mother, father, and sister each grapple with the implications of the accusation while attempting to maintain his innocence. By keeping the truth of the crime hidden until the climax of the story, Brown allows the absent Jacob to become a kind of cipher for each character, as their individual personalities and the intricacies of the family's interpersonal relationships are revealed over the course of the novel. By investigating the way Brown treats characterization, structure, imagery, and narration, one is able to see how the novel attempts to discuss and analyze an often unremarked aspect of any violent crime, namely, the disruptive and irrevocable effects it has on the family of the perpetrator and the strain the crime puts on their relationships and assumptions.

While it is difficult and ultimately misguided to attempt to divine the intentions of any author when considering his or her work, one may at least consider the effect of the work itself, and in this case, Before and After seems intent on complicating the reader's assumptions regarding individual's reactions to violent crimes especially the reaction of the suspects' family members. In particular, the character of Ben Reiser, Jacob's father, serves this purpose, because unlike every other character in the novel, Ben's story is told via first-person narration. Of all the characters, Ben seems the most illogical, in that he chooses to cover up for his son in the belief that he will somehow be able to protect him from capture and prosecution. While this desire is likely common amongst family members of criminal suspects, from the outside it is often difficult to separate a parent's love from complicity in the crime. The novel seeks to address this difficulty by letting the reader experience Ben's thought processes firsthand, so his subsequent actions appear, if not logical, then at least understandable. Thus, when Ben remarks that "right now I'd settle for a little disobedience, even a little flat-out lying" as he is searching Jacob's car, the reader is given a view into how much Ben wants the accusations to be false, and how this desire transforms into actions, such as cleaning the bloodied jack handle, which in his mind will serve to somehow make Jacob's innocence a reality (Brown 32). When faced with the possibility that his son might be a brutal murderer, Ben falls back on the tropes of a parent-child relationship, desiring an almost comfortable dishonesty between he and his son rather than face the terrifying truth (or at least what seems like the truth at the time). In addition to aiding the novel's attempts to intelligibly relate the emotional and psychological consequences of a violent crime beyond the actual event, Ben's actions also serve as part of the novel's statement regarding the nature of truth as it relates to narrative and narrative's importance to the American justice system.

When Ben cleans the jack handle and later concocts a different version of events in an attempt to protect his son, he is implicitly reinforcing the novel's subtle suggestion that what actually happens is far less relevant that how it is told. Ben knows that destroying evidence does not magically mean that Jacob is innocent, but rather that it could help prove his "innocence" in court. Similarly, the novel has fairly little interest in the actual events which led up to Martha's death, instead using the conflicting theories and narratives as a means of demonstrating the often ephemeral nature of "truth." Thus, minor details matter as much as the major points of the plot, seen most clearly when Jacob is giving an altered version of the story and states that the car keys were "in the trunk. The trunk lock, I mean," revealing "a shadow that remained from the real story" (Brown 257). The particular use of the word "shadow" is worth noting, because it alludes to the fact that any narrative, by definition, obscures the truth (which is seen only, as it is so often said, "in the harsh light of day"), by relaying that truth in bits and pieces edited and redacted by the narrator. In court, as in narrative, what is left out is as important as what is left in, and the author's decision to leave Jacob and the true sequence of events something of a mystery for the majority of the novel serves to highlight this fact. This further serves to demonstrate that the novel is entirely aware of its previously-mentioned argumentative purpose, because by acknowledging the way in which narrative serves to manipulate truth in order to produce a certain effect, the novel implicitly admits to the reader its own argumentative purpose and ideological influence.

The reader's impressions of the story necessarily change over the course of the novel, and one interesting way of charting this progression is to examine the shifting symbolic power of the jack handle itself. At first, the bloodied jack handle seems to be representative of a brutal, masculine force, as the assumption on the part of investigators, and indeed, the small town in which the novel is set, is that Jacob, who had previously "threatened to 'make [Martha] sorry' for flirting with someone" at a party, murdered his girlfriend after learning of her infidelity (Brown 332). Ben, the ostensibly "good" male character, attempts to erase the evidence of brutality from the phallic jack handle by cleaning it, thus altering the image of the jack handle back to its previously useful, peaceful form. In the end, however, as the truth of Martha's death is revealed, the jack handle loses all symbolic importance, and in much the same way that the novel complicates and challenges reader's assumptions regarding the families of suspected criminals, the transformation of the jack handle as a symbol for masculine brutality serves to challenge the reader's assumptions regarding masculinity and violence.

From here, one can see how in many ways, the small town itself stands in for the uncritical reader, as the town, in its committed condemnation of Jacob before a trial or the presentation of evidence, demonstrates the consequences of assumptions left unchallenged. By opting to set the story in a small town, the author not only provides certain necessary plot details, such as the fact that Jacob and Martha are snowed into the car, but also creates a sense of inescapability and enclosure that serves to heighten the tension of the novel and exacerbate the family's difficulties. The town represents the all-encompassing power of ideology and the assumptions it engenders, and helps demonstrate how quickly people can be mobilized against any who challenge that ideology or its assumptions, whether that be Jacob through his implication in Martha's death, or the Reiser family due to their insistence of Jacob's innocence. Thus, the setting is not merely a setting, but rather functions alongside the previously-mentioned aspects of the story in order to make the novel's overall point.