My Abandonment – Writing the Northwest

Most bankable fiction writers—those whose books become bestsellers and sometimes movies—rely on conventional storytelling and character development to affect their readers. But there are other, often-more-intriguing authors who rely more on mood or mystery or simply fine writing. They may not reach a wide audience, but they’re adept at subverting our expectations, fracturing our vision, and helping us see life in a new way.

Portland writer Peter Rock has had plenty of writing success—his 2009 novel My Abandonment, about a girl who lives off the grid with her father in an urban forest, was made into a major motion picture (“Leave No Trace”) and subsequently became a bestseller—but in his latest work, in particular, he has tended to be the second kind of author.

In his last two novels—2019’s The Night Swimmers and this year’s Passersthrough (both published by Soho Press)—Rock has used a spare, allusive style to focus closely on a small number of characters in a limited situation while suggesting that there is more going on around them than they or the reader can know, some of it possibly supernatural.

This approach can create a feeling of disorientation, a sense that you’re not understanding something important to the story. But if you release your mind from the need to be certain of everything at every moment, the mood and mystery can take over, allowing you to immerse yourself in Rock’s precise and often beautiful evocations of places, experiences, and sensations.

Even more than The Night Swimmers, set mostly in Wisconsin, Passersthrough, with its often-wild Northwest locales, explores the things we can’t know no matter how much we try, as well as our continued desire to uncover them.

The book begins with what seems at first to be a conventional story: An older man, Ben, and his estranged daughter, Helen, are trying to reconnect. Ben lives in Portland and Helen in California, so she has installed a device in his home that gives her a transcription of anything he says into it, and she speaks to him, in turn, by fax or phone or during the occasional visit.

Their “conversation,” mediated mostly by technology, centers primarily on what did or didn’t happen 25 years ago, when Helen was 11 and Ben sometimes took her into the woods. At some point something traumatic resulted. What it was isn’t entirely clear—to the reader or even the characters.

About all Ben and Helen agree on is that he had her walk blindfolded into the woods, left her overnight in a lean-to, and somehow lost track of her. A week later, she emerged far from where he last saw her. The only specific details we’re given are those of the girl’s rescue, which come courtesy of an old newspaper article Rock inserts into the text. Whatever happened, it caused his estrangement from his daughter to begin.

The rest of Passersthrough is, in many ways, an elaboration on this situation, but nothing is even this plain again. While walking near his house one day, Ben is attacked by a dog and befriended by the dog’s owner, a woman named Melissa who—along with her brother, Cisco—inserts herself into his life. It’s never quite clear whether they’re grifters or sincerely interested in helping him or maybe just the passersthrough of the book’s title.

As the story continues, it becomes less and less certain what perspective we’re seeing things from, and even what reality is. Rock sets several later scenes in the alluring but forbidding landscape around Mt. Hood, presenting it as a shadowy place of beauty, mystery, and danger.

The lean-to reappears, as does a lake from the older story that seems to move around. They’re joined by two children who died in a fire and the mother of a fawn Melissa has killed and carved up. When Ben, who has remained mostly passive throughout the book, makes an act of will near the end, the remaining fragments of story disintegrate further, becoming a series of incantatory images and feelings.

Does it all add up? Rock seems less interested in tying things together than giving us shards we can try to assemble ourselves…or maybe just leave as they are: signs of the possibilities around us and in us, as well as the unknowability of so much in life. Especially other people.

Passersthrough

Peter Rock

Soho Press

2022

$26 (hardcover)

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by Michael Schepps

Despite Oregon’s geographic proximity to Hollywood, films shot in the state are a rarity. Rarer still are films actually set in Oregon, films that embrace it as a place unto itself. The singularity of the setting and its place in the American psyche may help account for this paucity. Oregon, and the larger bioregion of the Pacific Northwest, continues to occupy a place apart in the American imagination, ensuring that its presence in narrative ties neatly in with the storytelling motif of the monomyth, or hero’s journey. This trope refers to the quest in which an individual must enter the “other world” in order to achieve a victory before returning, changed, to the world from which they came. This storytelling framework helps account for the enduring popularity of some of Oregon’s most defining films: the adolescent quest narratives of Stand By Me, The Goonies, and Coraline.

For generations, “The Oregon Trail”—whether as an actual physical track, the beguiling siren for scores of itinerants throughout the 19th century, or as the setting for a ubiquitous computer game— represented the ultimate terminality, the promised destination at the end of the arduous odyssey. In some atavistic corner of the American psyche, the Northwest remains a transcendental locale shaped by the journey and the quest when contrasted with the “ordinary world” of the remainder of the country. On film that division is even stronger. Much of the Pacific Northwest is filmically distinct, encompassing ecological and geographical extremes and standing utterly apart. In cinema, Oregon is a fantastical place—the other world— where anything can happen.

In 1986’s Stand By Me, director Rob Reiner replaces the Maine of Stephen King’s original short story with the small town of Brownsville in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The Oregon landscape reflects and enhances the gauzy second-order nostalgia of the post-war pastiche, in which a group of boys encounter the ultimate terminality of death in the form of a rumored cadaver. Quietly moldering pioneer townships and vital, pulsing greenery, with death lurking in the margins, are perfect for inducing an “otherworldly” presence, which helps account for the movie’s enduring popularity. The environment is a strange and threatening place—full of rattling trains on narrow bridges, hungry leeches and murderous bullies—the crucible in which the realized adult is formed. To travel there, in memory or on foot, is a challenge.

Offering a more fantastical take on a similar adolescent quest narrative, 1985’s Goonies is another beloved classic with lasting influence among those who came of age in the 1980s and 90s. Trading the verdant landscape of the Willamette Valley for the riparian setting of the Oregon Coast and the Columbia River, Goonies has the feel of a 19th century “boy’s own” adventure transplanted to the gently decaying rot of Reagen-era Astoria.

The propulsive script is fully immersed in the tropes of the monomyth. In it, a group of children–the titular Goonies– undertake a collective quest to find a pirate’s treasure, dodging obstacles in the form of murderous gangsters and elaborate booby-traps, in the hopes of saving their neighborhood from development. The “otherworldliness” of its ordinary setting is established in the opening scene, with a high-speed car chase sweeping through Astoria and ending near the remarkable seaside monolith of Haystack Rock. Long before the Goonies embark on their own journey into the fantastical, the viewer is transported to the numinous landscape of the Northwest itself.

A more recent addition to the canon of coming-of-age narratives set in Oregon, Laika’s 2009 hit Coraline takes the uncanny possibilities of the region to the extreme. The protagonist, the eponymous Coraline, begins the story newly transplanted from Michigan to the damp surreality of Ashland, Oregon. It is a grim and sodden place, inhabited by eccentrics and semi-neglected children, where the ignored Coraline soon discovers a mysterious portal to a literal “other world” in the form of a sinister mirror to her own.

Here the usage of the hero’s journey is explicit, with the “other world” a defined location and named as such. Coraline’s journey to, and subsequent flight from, this other world helps define her presence in the ordinary world, the exoticism of the Ashland setting made pedestrian in contrast to the baleful other.

As a new cohort of artists and filmmakers arises in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon’s potential as a narrative setting remains large and largely unexplored. The success of Travel Oregon’s recent “Only Slightly Exaggerated” campaign, with its surreal Miyazaki-inspired depiction of the state, points to the ways the state remains distinct; with a setting that can accept, challenge and strengthen whatever narrative it encounters.

[Editor’s note: A more recent addition to the kind of Oregon cinema Schepps explores here is “Leave No Trace,” based on the novel My Abandonment by Portland writer Peter Rock.]

Michael Schepps lives in Portland, Oregon where he is an editor for Kithe Journal, a publisher with Korza Books and a writer at large. In his free time he juggles, hikes and takes photographs of birds. For more of his work, go to MLSchepps.com and look for his debut novella Split Aces, to be released on January 22, 2022.

Tag: My Abandonment

Book Review: Exploring the Unknowable in Peter Rock’s PASSERSTHROUGH

Guest Post: The Myth of the “Other World” in Oregon-Set Films