The Rope Walk: A Novel [Paperback]

 

 

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The Rope Walk follows the path of ten-year-old Alice McCauley, a petite and perceptive redhead who lives in the town of Grange in the rocky Southern hills of Vermont with her five older brothers and her father, a Shakespeare scholar and a dean at the nearby college. Alice awakens one morning excited that it's her tenth birthday and grateful to this beautiful world around her that is awash with possibilities.

Alice has lived a sheltered life, after her mother died when she was little, her father and brothers have managed to keep most of the horrors of the world at bay. Alice could never imagine leaving this place as she swings her imaginary camera back and forth photographing the field, the orchard, and the lawn, and even the flower borders near the house, all rolling beneath her twinkling and flashing in the spring sun, these images bringing the girl comfort as she turns them over in her mind like prayers.

On this day, however, two special guests arrive at the McCauley house that is destined to change the way Alice views the world and her life. The young Theo is on holiday from New York City. In Vermont to visit his grandparents, Theo is drawn to Alice, finding comfort in her playful amicability and her singular kindness, as he gradually becomes her "brave little friend."

It seemed as though Theo has fallen into the McCauley's lives as if out of the ether, with no cords binding him to anyplace else and no end in sight to his stay with them. His grandparents are strangely distant and he never speaks about his parents, although Alice is constantly curious about them and suspicious about what she saw as their neglect of their boy.

For his part Theo offers her very few details about his life in NY city, his mother with her mysterious sad condition or his black father, his parents' falling -apart marriage, the thing that had caused them to abandon him. Yet Alice strangely thrilled at Theo's rambunctious sense of adventure, "he had so many ideas, things she hadn't even thought of doing."

But the far more mysterious guest to arrive at the party that day is Kenneth Mackenzie, a middle-aged artist who is dying of AIDS. Although neither Alice nor Theo really understand the circumstances of his condition, both are drawn to this strange and sickly man. Kenneth seems to attract Alice with his knowing expression, "you'll always remember this day," he says to her as of had known something about all the events to come.

Frail and pale skinned, and looking as if he were made of birth bark, Kenneth is not like any of the other adults, Alice is uncomfortably aware of being flattered by his attention almost as much as she is disconcerted by it. Attracted by his sense of isolation and loneliness, she feels inside herself the grief of that loss for him.

Alice and Theo begin to spend lazy afternoons at his house, reading a book about Meriwether Lewis and his expedition with William Clark across the American territories. Both she and Theo decide to passionately to do something for Kenneth, something heroic, on the order of Lewis and Clark's magnificent trek westward. "I just want to go for a walk in the woods by myself," he bellows and then staggers.

Author Carrie Brown skillfully juxtaposes Alice's innocence with the confluences of the wider world. That she does so with such elegance and style is a testament to the author's understanding of the human condition, especially for that of a child, for Alice's life is filled with the words and experiences many of which change her perspective of those around her.

Throughout the course of the novel Alice learns that people were not what she had imagined them to be - not her father nor her jocular brothers, who seemed to have abandoned her to the remote wilderness of Archie's care, and in the end, it's her friendship with Theo that gives her the most solace. The experiences with Theo - and the dying Kenneth - cause the world she's loved so passionately from her bedroom windowsill to seem so distant and insubstantial.

Quiet, introspective, and gorgeously written, The Rope Walk is all about Alice's journey of self-knowledge as happiness and sadness, beauty and cruelty join together inside her, entwining themselves inextricably "like the tendrils of a vine up the trunk of a tree." Brown indeed serves up a beautiful coming of age story about this courageous girl who in the end awakens to many of the harsh truths of life. Mike Leonard May 07.

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