Idyllic yet unsettling ‘Idaho’ mirrors a couple’s struggle with husband’s dementia

“Idaho,” Emily Ruskovich’s orchestral debut novel, is one of those books easier to describe through elimination.

It isn’t a murder mystery — though the senseless murder of a young girl pulses at its core.

It isn’t a relationship drama — though a man’s first and second wives drive the plot. And it isn’t a love story — at least, not the kind we might expect.

Instead, “Idaho” is an oddly compelling, at times dizzying spin through the ways memory can imprison or inspire us.

The bulk of the novel follows Ann and Wade Mitchell, a married couple living in the remote mountains of rural Idaho. Wade, a knife maker, has begun to exhibit the symptoms of early-onset dementia, the disease that claimed his father. Ann, a school music teacher, cares for him tenderly and gives him piano lessons, hoping the music and practiced movements will help preserve his mind.

Their slow-paced lives and snow-kissed homestead resemble a Norman Rockwell painting, but the backstory is more Norman Bates: in 1995, Wade’s first wife, Jenny, went to prison for murdering their younger daughter, May. And Wade’s older daughter, June, is still missing years after she fled the scene of the crime.

To Ann, Wade is frustratingly silent about his old life. Only once does he speak directly about the murder — and then, only to say, “It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a thing that she (Jenny) did on purpose. It was a thing that happened. To her and by her, and that’s it.”

Ruskovich turns that quasi-explanation into a kind of refrain. Scenes of senseless, almost spectral violence haunt the pages, choking even nostalgic scenes with a queasy, anxious air.

As Wade’s dementia worsens, he begins to lash out instinctively at Ann, pushing her nose into a box of clothes or grinding her cheek against a tray of spilled knives — behaviors borne from years of training dogs.

“She did not understand these things,” Ruskovich writes, “but knew that Wade didn’t understand them, either, and so she found no way to express her anger. No way to stop these episodes from happening again.”

The anxiety is amplified by Ruskovich’s vivid, unsettling images. Throughout the book, Ruskovich paints the Idaho landscape as both idyllic and wild.

Romantic, almost nostalgic details — the pink light of an early winter evening, the hushed brushstrokes of snow on plastic grocery sacks — are punctured by an angry gash of barbed wire or the scent of an engine-burned rodent’s nest. In one scene, a Good Samaritan tugs off his glove to reveal a swastika tattoo.

The rhythm of the writing expertly mirrors the progression of Wade’s disease — music and its abrupt halt, a piano chord unresolved as he fumbles at the keys. Still, at times Ruskovich falls into the trap of too many contemporary novelists and sacrifices concrete details for abstract lyricism.

In a flashback to Wade and Jenny’s relationship, she evokes garter snakes hiding in the ground, “so many secret, coiled wills, a million centers spiraling out, colliding into a clap of silence that is this very moment in the house, this beautiful oblivion in which they love each other.”

A clap of silence, a beautiful oblivion. And what was that bit about the snakes?

While pretty, these observations feel untethered to a particular character’s way of seeing. Instead, many lines read like emotional scat singing, sapping energy from otherwise taught, fraught scenes. (A late-novel chapter from a bloodhound’s perspective is especially egregious, posing as climax without offering us new or deeper understanding).

We find anchor, however, in Ann’s hungry perspective. As Wade loses all memory of the murder or his daughters, Ann attempts to claims them as her inheritance. Her “memories” may be inventions — conjured from a stain on Wade’s pickup truck seat or a discarded antler colored with crayons — but they bring us (and her) closer to an insidious understanding.

The resulting novel is a tense, artful meditation on memory with sustained suspense and a splash of gothic horror.

“We are more porous than we know,” Ruskovich writes. We close the book uncomfortably aware of what might seep through the cracks.

This story was originally published January 14, 2017 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Idyllic yet unsettling ‘Idaho’ mirrors a couple’s struggle with husband’s dementia."