TAKEN
INby Beverly Coyle
$24.95, Cloth
Review by Marshall Bruce Gentry
TAKEN
IN
by Beverly Coyle
$24.95, Cloth
Review by Marshall Bruce Gentry
Malcolm Robb, who works in a college admissions office, would deny admission to his own son Matt because the young man is too religious. Conflicts between the father and son cause the keeping of all sorts of secrets within the Robb family and even seem to contribute to the strange events next door, where a neighbor, Oren Abel, fascinatingly decides to come out as a cross-dresser and turns his house over to an abused teenager who is soon visited by her murderous abuser.
At the center of Beverly Coyle's fine new novel (from Viking Penguin) is an almost-random murder. While the usual treatment in our culture of such events is to leave behind meaning for the sake of cheap excitement, Taken In uncovers layers of complex significance in a violent situation, revealing even the sacred. The long sequence in which the characters realize that a murder has been committed is beautifully heartbreaking, and, more importantly, it is not the end: the novel's second half focusses on surprises in the struggle to recover from a loved one's death. Taken In braids together characters of different social classes and beliefs into a family even a most cynical reader can embrace.
Coyle, the author of two previous works of literary fiction (The Kneeling Bus and In Troubled Waters) and a professor at Vassar College, is an excellent storyteller, able to find in her often grim situations both humor and spiritual mystery. One of Coyle's most interesting techniques is her regular shifting of point of view; while one never has trouble following the plot of Taken In, one does learn that apparently minor characters are very important, that several characters can take turns seeming to be the novel's protagonist. Coyle writes especially insightfully about teenagers, managing to make the daughter in the Robb family, Gretchen, a high school student concerned about her acting class, bloom believably into the novel's moral intelligence. Taken In leaves one feeling good about possibilities for personal renewal, even when (perhaps especially when) spirituality is distanced from religion.
