Scars of buried trauma

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Maureen Gibson’s Thief starts on an interesting premise: Suzanne, a teacher, takes a log cabin near a lake for the summer and puts out a personal advertisement. A rapist responds from jail. Suzanne was raped when she was 16.

Tentatively, she starts a correspondence with the unknown rapist. The letters between them open up the possibility for her to deal with her trauma and gain an understanding of herself, the horrendous act of violence that she has borne, the scars she has carried, the ghosts she has buried, and even, to some extent, an opening up to the kind of man who has perpetuated the violence.
The protagonist is scarred by her rape and she chooses to resurrect the other — the rapist. The setting of the story: a teacher and a rapist who the writer has named Alpha Breville, a log cabin near a lake in rural Minnesota, the prison house in Stillwater, seem unreal. But the way Maureen plumbs her mind and lays bare her life past and present, soon enough the reader is hooked to the story. Once there, everything, including the sexual acts, seems real and intimate. Maureen writes well. Her timing and descriptive passages are brilliant. Like Sophie Cunningham’s Geography, what keeps us glued to the book is Maureen’s portrayal of the protagonist’s mind. The way she peels each layer of Suzanne’s psyche, including her confronting the fact that finally in the truck, the day she was raped, during the act, she had participated in the act. I liked Suzanne’s spirit. Even after the act, in spite of her scars, she remains a giving lover and does not shy away from encounters. She is willing to confront her sexuality but remains stuck at the level of the physical.
She builds Alpha meticulously, through his letters and phone calls and eventually by meeting him a few times in prison. On Page 15 he writes to her:
I have changed from the person I was when I raped. I’ve had choices to make in here about how I serve my time and I’ve tried to make good ones. I work as much as they permit me. I take college classes... I can’t change the past but I am working to change the future. I do not want to live the way I lived before. I do not want to be in denial ever again about what I did... I know I have nothing to offer you, except maybe to give you someone to hate.
He is a man deprived of freedom, who wonders what came upon him that he committed the unplanned rape. Yet, he is human and has desires. He even starts planning a reappeal to the sentence and a life with Suzanne.
As the relationship builds through what Alpha asks her to do, she discovers that his mind has not changed from when he was 19 years old and had committed the crime. In that, I think Maureen fails as a writer because we do not really move beyond the act that puts Alpha in jail and scars Suzanne. The extremely evocative writing does not manage to camouflage the essential mind of the rapist from where he still objectifies women and the book falls prey to the stereotype. He can’t be redeemed.
Read the book to see how many layers we hide in our minds. No doubt rape is a tough subject to grapple with in a book. It is about transfiguration, a most personal act of violence, an act after which a whole gender becomes alien to a self, one’s most private space is snatched forever. One does not and can’t expect grand solutions, but to fall back into the original trap of the gendered self and the other seemed regressive. The positive is that Suzanne decides to give up the relationship and not seek such identity through others.