Between the Pages
by Marianne Szlyk

Badlands. by Cynthia Reeves. Oxford: Miami University Press, 2007. 
ISBN: 978-1-4243-3108-6.  221 pp.  $15.

Reading Cynthia Reeves’ novella Badlands is a harrowing experience because of its intense focus on the last day of one woman’s life.  Caroline Singleman, a once-beautiful woman in her late forties, is dying from metastatic breast cancer.  Keeping watch with her in their home in the Philadelphia suburbs are her devoted husband, Daniel, whom she met in Bryn Mawr ‘s library, and their children, Alex, a sophomore at Columbia, and Henry, a former high school athlete.  At the limit of her physical endurance, the dying woman hovers between her present and her psychic engagement with a mother and son killed at the Battle of Wounded Knee.  The tightly-focused narrative is divided between Caroline’s voice and that of her husband and includes excerpts from testimony about the aftermath of Wounded Knee.   An experimental work that is compassionate and abstains from sentimentality, Badlands may be read on more than one level.

Badlands refuses to do more than speculate about the survivors’ lives after Caroline’s death or, equally, allude to their pasts.  I have the sense that, for Daniel, his life began the moment he and his future wife met in the library’s sub-basement stacks.  Yet, as they met, he sketched for her German architect Bruno Taut’s glass cities.  These cities had intrigued him, a chaste idealist in a profoundly carnal and cynical time, the mid-1970s.  It may well be, as Daniel imagines, his life will effectively end with his wife’s just as it truly began with their first meeting.  He supposes that he will become “a forgetful old man in a faded terry bathrobe and scuffed leather house shoes filling in pages of a journal” (128), similiarly, before the return of her cancer, his wife once mused in an armchair and wrote poetry while the family slept. 

Conversely, Caroline’s life appears to have retreated somewhere between her encounter with Daniel and her sudden departure from an archeological dig in South Dakota.  Among the figures who haunt her is her professor and former lover, Dietrich, a man she once dismissed to her then-fiancé as “ancient,” with “hair growing out of his nose” (57).  She calls on Dietrich early in the novella as she lies beside her sleeping husband and recognizes their distance from each other.  Her former lover, being dead, will not “betray” her (3).  He will not be repelled by her scarred, bloated body or her bald head or the tumor growing out of her abdomen. 

The ghosts of the Sioux and their land, however, haunt her more persistently.   From the second chapter on, the dead mother and son become her companions.  The chronology of the novella adds an interesting and unusual texture. Caroline alternately meditates on their bones and speaks to them in a dream sequence.   They even become her second selves, more than Dietrich can ever be.  Half-waking, half-sleeping, she chants fragments from a Ghost Dance song and calls her son “Little Magpie,” the name she has given to the dead boy.  The Miniconju mother also holds Caroline’s infant daughter in one scene where Dietrich defends his stance towards the bones.  In several chapters, the bones of the dead mother and her son come between Caroline and her professor, replaying her refusal of the rationality and careerism embodied by the middle-aged man.  He alternately describes her as his “most promising student” (92, italics his) and claims kinship with her, yet when he tries to convince her to abandon the bones, she remembers the boy dying and invokes her affinity with his mother.  She and Little Magpie may well be the dead to whom Caroline refers at the end of the novella.   Not Dietrich.  Not the deceased members of her family.

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