Inside the Refuge of a Book

“This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.” Who is the speaker of this line of Divisadero? While the book does not express the identity of the speaker explicitly, it implies the voice is the author’s. This metafictional moment in the book raises the question of the extent to which the novel is about the writer himself.  Ondaajte’s Divisidero suggests that the stories of the various characters within this book are the means by which the author confronts himself. In this way, the novel attributes to fiction the ability to act as a refuge for the author, who can express himself behind the mask of other characters’ stories.

The scenes involving the water tower, in particular, show the struggle of the author to understand and express his identity through the characters he creates. When Coop repairs the water tower, he must do so by driving redwood, which is supposed to last over a hundred years, into the hole from the inside. Coop must find the barrier between the water and the air inside the tower to find the leak. The novel links this border above and below the water with Claire and Anna’s interchangeable identities. By driving the redwood into this barrier, then, Coop essentially distinguishes between the two girls and their identities. In this way, the author shows the struggle to distinguish his identity from other identities. Divisadero complicates the author’s struggle, as expressed through Coop, however, when the water tower breaks during the great storm and the redwood, which is supposed to last over a hundred years, apparently fails to serve its purpose. When the water tower breaks after Anna’s father catches Anna and Coop together and Anna runs away, it is as if their identities themselves are beyond the realm of repair. This moment serves as a microcosm for the rest of the book, in that the characters’ and the author’s struggles emerge as efforts to indirectly express the traumatic past.  Yet, Ondaajte’s novel insists that turning the traumatic past into a story is not a kind of “talking cure;” rather, it is only because the trauma is not healed that we get fiction at all.  The “third-person speaker” is thus the writer’s entrance into a refuge of art that protects him from the traumatic past, even as the trauma serves as his unlikely muse.

Throughout the rest of the book, the exchangeability of the characters’ stories increases. Anna and Bridget become connected as both are Coop’s lovers and both watch him get beat up because of his affection for them. When Claire finds Coop brutally beaten and tied to a chair, she asks him if he remembers Anna. Coop then calls Claire “Anna,” making explicit that which the narrative has already implied, that their two identities are indistinguishable.  Also, the horse imagery, which is associated with Claire’s bravery and identity in the first half of the book, comes to be associated with Rafael’s struggle to establish his identity apart from his mother in the second half of the book. The repetition of images and motifs such as these suggest that Divisadero’s story transcends the characters themselves; the deeper story is that of an author, attempting to understand and express himself through his characters. While the story may not be about the characters, the characters are still vastly valuable; for, to get to the point of view of this writer, we must follow the overlapping paths of his complex and intimately connected characters.

-- Ashley Young