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Black and Blue (1998)
Random House, 293 pages, $23.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-375-50051-0
Black and Blue is a first-person account by Fran Benedetto, age 38. Fran begins the story as she and her 10-year-old son, Robert, are waiting to connect with an unidentified contact who will take them away from Fran's abusive husband, Bobby, a New York City police officer. Fran and Robert end up in Lake Plata, Florida, where they begin a new life as Beth and Robert Crenshaw.
I had hoped that the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Quindlen would produce some new insight into the dynamics of domestic abuse in this novel. But I was disappointed in the flat, unbelievable, and finally contradictory characterization of Fran Benedetto. (Note: even after assuming the identity of Beth Crenshaw, Fran continues to think of herself as Fran Benedetto. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to refer to her as Fran throughout this discussion.)
Fran vocalizes the ambivalence toward her abuser that many abused women express, the assertion that they still love the one who harms them. In explaining her initial attraction to Bobby she speaks of "that butterscotch-syrup voice that made goose bumps rise on my arms when I was young" (p. 3):
As rich and persuasive as Bobby Benedetto's voice, that was how full and palpable was his sorrow and regret. And how huge was his rage. It was like a twister cloud; it rose suddenly from nothing into a moving thing that blew the roof off, black and strong. I smell beer, I smell bourbon, I smell sweat, I smell my own fear, ranker and stronger than all three.Yet the Fran Benedetto who lived in New York had a responsible job as a nurse in an emergency room. During an emergency in Florida, she naturally does what is necessary to deal with the situation. It's hard to reconcile this competent, confident Fran with the Fran who says, "Sometimes Bobby even made me believe that I was guilty of something, that I was sleeping with every doctor at the hospital, that I made him slip and bang his bad knee. That I made him beat me up, that it was me who made the fist, angled the foot, brought down a hand hard. Hard" (p. 5).(p. 6)
And it's hard to take Fran—who is a reasonable, educated person—seriously when she speculates that Bobby turned mean after he'd been passed over for a couple of promotions, after he'd suffered a "thousand small disappointments, a half dozen big ones" (p. 66). Surely Fran would realize that a few disappointments in life don't set everyone on the path to such meanness and violence. Again, it's hard to reconcile the shallow-thinking Fran with the woman who offers this psychologically complex explanation for why she stayed with Bobby as long as she did and why she finally took Robert and fled:
I stayed because I wanted my son to have a father and I wanted a home. For a long time I stayed because I loved Bobby Benedetto, because no one had ever gotten to me the way he did. I think he knew that. He made me his accomplice in what he did, and I made Robert mine. Until that last time, when I knew I had to go, when I knew that if I told my son I'd broken my nose, blacked my eyes, split my lip, by walking into the dining-room door in the dark, that I would have gone past some point of no return. The secret was killing the kid in him and the woman in me, what was left of her. I had to save him, and myself.In an interview with BookPage (see Reference Notes) Quindlen says, "I think it's important to say that I didn't do any research for this book." She continues, "…people assume that I spent six months in shelters talking to women who have been beaten up. That belies the fact that to some extent the violence in this book is a metaphor for something else. It's a metaphor for a complete lack of communication and understanding that sometimes takes place in a marriage." I wish Quindlen had done some research before writing about this subject, as it might have enabled her to do a bit more justice to all the women for whom bruises and broken bones are literal reality, not metaphors.(p. 11)
Fran Benedetto is just about the same age as, and has been abused for the same length of time as, Paula Spencer, the narrator of Roddy Doyle's novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Paula Spencer is the more credible, and therefore more sympathetic, representative of the battered woman.
Search Notes in the Margin |
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