Book Review: Readings

Illustration By Lisa Kirkpatrick

The Absence of Nectar

Putnam, 304 pp., $23.95

The Absence of Nectar, Kathy Hepinstall's achingly sad new novel, is rich with the perfume of loss: not just the loss of sweetness, but the loss of parents, the loss of love, the loss of justice, and the loss of God. The redolence of a familiar grief is there from the first line: "All these years later, there remains a scar on my face."

Hepinstall is an Austin writer whose first novel, The House of Gentle Men (2000), earned a spot on the Los Angeles Times' bestseller list. That book was an exquisite paean to redemption and grace; this one, as its title suggests, explores bleaker spiritual latitudes. But it retains the first novel's lyric voice and clear, stubborn affection for imperfect humanity.

The Absence of Nectar is the story of two East Texas siblings, 14-year-old Boone and his 11-year-old sister Alice, our narrator. They are opposites, Alice fierce and untrusting, Boone gentle and saintly. These contrary (but inseparable) siblings love their own opposites from afar. Alice pines for a shy, sickly neighbor boy, while Boone sends lovesick letters about God to Persely Snow, poisoner of her own parents and infamous mental institution escape artist. (Hepinstall has a sweet touch here with early adolescent courtship. Tiny letters printed under a stamp: "I want to meet you. I have Ding Dongs.")

But the adults who should care for these children are vanished or toxic: the gentle father who unforgivably abandons them; the dreamy, ineffectual mother they call Meg, a beekeeper whose colonies have died, unable to live without a man; and worst, Simon Jester, the terrifying stepfather Meg thrusts into their lives.

None of the many characters Hepinstall carefully introduces is extraneous; every thread is woven tightly into the main story. God, as omnipresent here as he is rumored to be, very nearly counts as a character, too, or perhaps as several. He exists as atheist Alice's holly bush deity, to whom she vainly sacrifices Barbie doll and Lincoln Log treasures: "Make him go away! Make him love someone else!" Boone's God "was fully formed of flesh and grace; He roared out of the Bible to love crazily. ... A diving, twirling God, athletic in His mercy and His rage." God's third avatar is the vindictive thug who employs their stepfather, who calls himself "God's megaphone."

But mostly God, like their father, is simply absent, and certainly unwilling to protect the innocent or deal out justice. For example, the family dog Numbhead, brain-damaged in a go-cart accident, is a fool-saint, a lovely and hilarious creation: His single occupation is to carry a fat toad in his mouth, so delicately that the harassed amphibian is never harmed. Even when neighborhood toddler-sociopaths teach the dog to snap his jaws around butterflies, he always releases the delicate creatures unhurt.

But for a joke, a hateful adult tricks Numbhead into snapping his jaws around a hornet, and he almost dies. As Persely writes Boone in her own peculiar vernacular, "When you tke the devil into your mouth you re doomed" (she doesn't like the letter "A").

Persely is quoting her favorite Clint Eastwood movie, but taking the devil into your mouth is a literal terror for these children: Poison oozes throughout the tale, and Alice and Boone live in such dread of Simon and his library of poisoning manuals that they begin to waste away, too afraid to eat the food on their own table. Then one evening, Meg comes to their room to whisper one word: Run. The story that follows is suspenseful, disturbing, and profoundly moving.

Few gods are left standing by the end of this book. "If God was the nectar, then nectar was absent from this dry planet," Alice observes. In The Absence of Nectar, Kathy Hepinstall sings a homey, almost nostalgic song of loss, terror, and grief -- as if you were listening to "Tom Dooley" and suddenly heard the lyrics for the first time.