The scent of a murder

In 2004 Ann Mitchell, Wade’s second wife of nine years, sits in their out-of-commission family truck parked on an Idaho mountainside. In this truck, one summer morning in 1995, Wade’s first wife, Jenny, took an axe to her beloved younger daughter, May. The older child, June, fled into the forest and was not seen again; Jenny was sentenced to life imprisonment. Why? What happened? The scene appears set for a murder mystery, with the usual twists and thrills, guaranteeing ultimate gratification of the reader’s thirst for solutions. Emily Ruskovich’s moving and profound debut novel denies such generic satisfaction.

Within the abandoned truck, Ann recurrently seeks to imagine what led up to the murder. Her quest is urgent now, since her husband suffers from early onset dementia. What Wade has not disclosed may never be communicated: the memories he does retain are obscure. Although the love between Ann and Wade is enduringly passionate and tender, his behaviour is tinged by minor outbreaks of bizarre violence. The scene in the truck is dominated by scent, residual or imagined: a pair of leather gloves Wade kept, perhaps to preserve the trace of the “last smell in his daughter’s hair”; the “smell of grease and honeysuckle”.

Idaho is a world of vivid particularity, a collection of evanescent traces and tracks, stains and remnants. Ruskovich presents a landscape of aftermaths and mnemonics: cryptic remains of indeterminate presence. I was reminded of Heathcliff’s speech in Wuthering Heights: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.” People vanish, like a boy Ann once taught who left a smudge on piano keys, a fingerprint on a window. The motif of loss recurs in the poetry of the simplest sentences: “The mountain’s gone.”

Ruskovich’s human characters keep company with native animals, from moose to deer, from beetles to flies, subject to the same vicissitudes and the one death. The author’s sympathetic imagination extends, movingly, to all animal life, the child who is killed and the fly she may have killed: “Ann sees May, sitting with her hand perfectly still in midair, waiting for the fly to trust her so she can kill it,and then there is a black stop in Ann’s mind.”

Structurally, the novel is complex, requiring and rewarding a reader’s intent concentration. A fragmented construction zigzags to and fro between multiple perspectives and unchronological dates, from 1973 to 2025 — a mimesis of the lost mental bearings of its characters. Idaho ricochets between images of integration and disintegration, like the “dozens of black birds” Ann and Wade watch as they “converge and scatter like a handful of black sand thrown against the sky”. Some narrative angles are tangential to the major story: Elizabeth, Jenny’s cellmate, movingly enters into friendship with the taciturn, wounded woman who murdered her own daughter. Ruskovich’s sympathy extends to all her characters, trapped within the irlimitations, doing their decent best, mediating for one another, but prey to random compulsions of violence or flight.

Idaho is a meditation on the power and limits of the individual imagination, as well as on memory and its aberrations. What can we understand or intuit about other people, given that our knowledge owes so much to subjective guesswork? Ann, labouring to reconstruct the unthinkable murder, recognises her imaginings as a form of fiction, projected on a world of multiple truths.

After the murder, the fleeing June was tracked, too late, by a police dog. A late, bravura, chapter is told from the bloodhound’s point of view — or rather, from its “tunnel vision”, as, head to the ground, its senses are suffused by an explosion of compound smells. A single scent is scarcely distinguishable from the flood of odours that cross-contaminate. June’s “glove that they’ve held over his snout” conveys too many messages, identifying a multiplicity of sources: “the sweat inside, the deer it was once the skin of ... the truck ... blood [and] dirty, perfumed hair ... the bright zing smell of seeds burst open from pods grazed by a child’s fingertips”. The child’s fugitive trace has perished nearly at source.

In the final third of the novel, telling becomes excessively fragmentary, resembling short stories in a composite novel. At one point I failed to recognise a character and had to return to the beginning to identify him. That I was prepared to do so speaks volumes for the exceptional quality of Ruskovich’s writing.

–Guardian News & Media Ltd

Stevie Davies’s Equivocator is published by Parthian.