Heading West

the long version

With a mesmerizing richness of feeling, character, and suspense, Doris Betts' novel takes us into the life of a bright, spiky, vital woman in her thirties, fleeing the murderous boredom of her spinster life- and into her deepening and mysterious complicity with the unbalanced stranger who has kidnaped her. It starts in North Carolina, Nancy Finch-librarian, choir alto, solicitous Elder daughter and Big Sister-has consented once again (and against her real wishes) to join her dumb sister, Faye, and Faye's awful husband, Eddie, on a vacation trip through Blue Ridge Mountains. Suddenly-in the state park where they've stopped for lunch-a lone marauder appears, ties up Faye and Eddie, steals their money, and grabs Nancy. He doesn't hurt her or gag her. He simply pushes her into his car. Now she's heading west with this sharp-featured bird-chested Iconic man with a gun whose intentions are an enigma to her. Hours pass, days pass. They move thorough Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico-sharing the driving, talking at firs desultorily, then with a curious impulse to connect. Although Nancy-the kidnapper's eyes always on her-tries to signal for help (at motels, in luncheonettes to garage attendants, to the elderly hitchhiker who becomes her fellow captive), no one on the road seems able to interpret her desperate, muffled features, her masked pleas, or to distinguish between abduction and friendship. She makes plan after plan. She chances fails at, and retreats from a real escape. And as reluctantly, she comes to realize that beneath her terror, she is engaged in some kind of strange, silent collaboration with her abductor, the novel winds to a fierce pitch until, nearing the awesome (and dangerous) Grand Canyon, she both confronts her truest self and examines the agents of her unforeseen and miraculous destiny. In a novel that combines the excitement and tension of a masterly thriller with a brilliantly moving projection of a woman's interior state, Doris Betts achieves the fullest expression of her remarkable novelistic gifts.