Brown, “The Accidental Goodbye” (reviewed by Harlow Clark)

Review
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Title: The Accidental Goodbye
Author: Marilyn Brown
Publisher: Walnut Springs Press
Genre: Western / Romance / Literary Novel / Historical Fiction
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 231
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 978-1-59992-956-9
Price: $17.99

Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

The Ones We Didn’t Expect to See

Note, other books mentioned in this review are available on http://marilynbrownauthor.com/index.html com/

Each day on my commute to work the Frontrunner train passes through a narrow place along the Jordan River. To the east is a large sand pit steadily eating away at the remains of a geological feature which at one time came all the way down to the river, ending in a steep ridge above the river, called the Point of the Mountain, but which is gradually becoming pointless. To the west a mountain range whose name I am familiar with from childhood, having heard often the announcement that KUED broadcasts “from a transmitter high atop Mount Vision in the Oquirrh mountains.”

I imagined the Oquirrhs as some place remote and mysterious as the name, not realizing they were that range west of the Salt Lake Valley. Nor did I realize that the Kennecott copper mine, touted as the largest man-made excavation on our planet, was a strip mine, or had started out as a mountain, and the dirt piling down its side was the ghost of a mountain. Nor did it occur to me when I read that the big pit was played out and Rio Tinto wanted to extend the mine that that meant making a ghost out of the next mountain north of the excavation.

A few years before Rio Tinto announced the main pit was played out, Marilyn Brown asked me if I wanted to read a novel she was about to publish called *Ghosts of the Oquirrhs.* (It didn’t quite occur to me that she wanted me to write a blurb for it, because she didn’t ask, but she may have thought that since I’d written one for *The House on the Sound*–I admit to being slow on the uptake.)

It was a strange novel about a stranger who comes into town and shakes things up by beginning to prophesy about people flying through the air in metal tubes and crashing into tall buildings. It was shortly after 9/11 and the reference seemed a bit forced, too topical, not like the scene in Richard Peck’s *The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp* where Blossom sees her friends as old people sitting in a room full of blue light coming from a box in the corner. Oh yes, of course children in 1912 would have lived to see television’s blue light specials.

But that wasn’t why I didn’t write a blurb, and you can see what I might have written if I’d had Pinterest and its 500-character limit as a form to work with on my page, https://www.pinterest.com/wolrah/some-favorite-books/

I found the novel memorable, and have often thought of it fondly and regretted (for reasons I’ll refer to below) that I returned the printout to Marilyn.

So when I read the description of Marilyn’s new novel *The Accidental Goodbye*, I thought it sounded like a rewrite of *Ghost of the Oquirrhs*, which she confirmed to me, calling it a “vigorous revision.” And I agree. It is a vigorous novel, and I much appreciate the re-seeing not just of the story but of the genres it moves within.

On the page after the bio-note is an ad for *Waking in Tombstone*, which has the following phrase, “arriving in a city reeling with tumult after the terror of the OK Coral shoot-out.” If you watch the western channel for a week you are likely to see some version of that shoot-out. If not, you’ll surely see at least one shoot-out. Per hour. And I guarantee that in most of them you won’t see the city reeling with tumult after the terror of the shootout (except maybe in movies like *The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,* *The Shootist*, *A Fistful of Dollars*, or *Legends of the Fall*).

In most of the 168 hours you’ll watch on the western channel that week the shoot-out will be the deliverance for the reeling town, deliverance from tumult and terror. I’ve often wished for a different perspective, like the one expressed in the ad copy, and in *The Accidental Goodbye*, which has the mining town, the claim jumpers, the stranger who strides into town bringing chaos in his wake, the card game gone wrong, the hanging tree, and the colorful characters, like Lottie Pickard who wants to be buried sitting up, with a window in her coffin so she can watch the resurrection–but the coffin is a little too tall for the grave.

And it has something else, a fire burning down the town in the first chapter, which gives the story of the events leading up to the fire a sense of inevitability. It could be a sense of futility as well, but the theme of accidents and goodbyes is Marilyn’s tool for avoiding futility, and for avoiding the satire of that scene in George MacDonald’s *The Princess and Curdie* where the miners undermine the kingdom.

Also the theme of hello and goodbye. The first of Marilyn’s novels I read was *Goodbye, Hello* (reissued as *The Light in the Room*), and for a year or two before I read the book I lived with the haunting image in the first page or two of the people you expect to greet you when you pass, and those you don’t, and the stranger who does.

In *The Accidental Goodbye*, Brooker Rose–the disruptive stranger who comes into town during Lottie Pickard’s funeral–discourses with Cecily on hellos and goodbyes.

“Goodbyes are just accidents you can live through,” he said. “Around the corner there are always hellos.”

A few paragraphs later he adds:

“The Hello isn’t always what you thought it should be. You have to wait for it. And most important–when it comes you have to recognize it” (p. 43).

Being able to recognize things is a major theme in this novel, and in Marilyn Brown’s other work, but that ability can be clouded by the patterns we use to organize our recognizings. For example, Cecily McKinsey sees and hears ghosts, but father McKinsey (as she calls him, and yes, when I read the phrase I hear a bass “writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear,” and wonder if the window in Lottie Pickard’s coffin isn’t really to “look at all the lonely people”) doesn’t accept ghost-seeing as a valid category of human experience.

Brooker tries to buy the claim to a played-out mine, but the owner can’t be found. In the meantime Brooker starts working it and bringing gold out. He tells Cecily he knew there was gold there because the gold said hello to him. Communicating with the elements and giving out prophecies about privies right inside the house and people flying through the air in metal tubes are not generally categories we recognize or use to organize our experience, so rumors start that Brooker and his partner have murdered the mine owner and thrown his body down a dry well.

The rumors lead to an attempt to lower someone down into the well to retrieve the body, resulting in a horrible accident (rather more graphic in *Ghosts* if I recall rightly).

This question of how we treat people and things that don’t fit our categories applies to the book as well. It wants to be a romance novel. “Will Cecily’s dreams of love come true?” is the headline on the back cover. Cecily wants a romance, but her father doesn’t want her to have one with Brooker, and she doesn’t understand the sexual component of romance. (*Ghosts* has a scene where she is shocked to discover herself as a sexual being–and so were some readers and when Marylin apologized for the scene on AML-List and announced she had cut it, I wished I hadn’t returned the printout so that the scene could at least be preserved among my papers if not Marilyn’s. The scene is in *The Accidental Goodbye* in sublimated form.)

As I suggested earlier, *The Accidental Goodbye* is a kind of hybrid, with the dark themes of mining, murder and mob found in a lot of westerns, but expressed with a light touch. This can be a bit disorienting. Consider Simeen Brown’s cover. My first reaction was that it didn’t have the haunting, ominous quality of her cover for Margaret Young’s *Salvador* (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/welcometable/2016/05/salvador-the-truth-behind-the-fiction/), with that creepy reptilian eye.

This cover is almost festive, but where does that festivity come from? the vine and flower shapes? Cecily McKinsey’s blue and brown hat (two hats?), the festive red outfit? the wind-blown hair? Not from the town burning in the background, certainly, but perhaps from the curlicues. Or maybe they’re the tendrils of greed and gossip that come into town with Brooker, or against him.

(And how delightful to come across a brief comment about Simeen in co-author Florence Child Brown’s *I Cannot Tell a Life.* I got a review copy but before I had finished it Marilyn announced she was pulling the book from distribution because of discontent among family members about how they were portrayed. I see it available on marilynbrownauthor.com, so someone must have resolved the problems. A fine book indeed, well worth your time to read.)

Though the cover says *The Accidental Goodbye* wants to be a romance, the dark themes of murder, dissolution and marital discord make it read more like *Middlemarch* or *The House of the Seven Gables* (to name two I’ve listened to this year) than *Pride and Prejudice.* Or maybe it’s closer to *Pride and Prejudice and Zombies*, which I haven’t read.

So we have a refreshingly disquieting novel looking at life through an odd window, and a hopeful one. There’s a coda at the end about the history of Mercur (which Cecily calls Sweet Pie) after the fire, but unlike George MacDonald’s coda to *The Princess and Curdie*–a preacher’s moral to end the story on a satiric note–this coda is about reclamation, just as the novel is about reclaiming the genres it stakes claim to.

I can imagine companies of millennial miners swarming the slopes of Bingham Canyon carrying shovelful upon shovelful to the brink of the pit, exalting the mountains which have been laid low, bringing the ghostly Oquirrhs back to life, while the ghosts of their ancestors give them names and dates and family history to take to the temple after work so they can enjoy the blessings of the resurrection, all the while with Lottie Pickard enjoying the view of all the no-longer-lonely people.