The Trespassers

Catherine Mansure must decide whether to sacrifice her life of leisure on a large estate in California and perhaps even the love of her son for her powerful, passionate love of a musician who makes his living growing marijuana

Set in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, this draggy tale of adultery in the woods recalls Lady Chatterley's Lover with a lush, realistic, sensitive exploration of sexual love--and, unfortunately, with an annoyingly faithful imitation of D. H. Lawrence in his mythifying, vapid mode. Catherine Mansure is stagnating in her marriage to former Berkeley radical Rick, now a self-controlled, pompous scion who tends his wealthy family's wooded estate and corporate affairs. While Rick sinks into semi-invalidism, Catherine makes love on the forest floor with Henry Bascomb, a reticent woodsman and bluegrass fiddler who grows a marijuana crop on Mansure land. In the manner of Lady Chatterley, Bascomb is the elemental intruder who ravages a sexually dormant upper-class woman whose very body parts brim with primordial, goddess-like powers. Catherine, who neglects her Nintendo-playing son Ben, ignores the cautionary advice of her friend Maryanne, a tough divorce lawyer, and of her own sister Muriel, who observes: "The fog that envelopes you . . . wonderful, in a way, like some storybook romance. But it's being played out in real time." Rick, who's having an affair of his own, condemns his wife as a self-absorbed seeker of true feelings, a characterization that fatuous, whiny Catherine nearly earns. Roper ( Mexico Days ) makes the most of the Lawrentianok/rl echoes and parallels, though readers expecting a lot of graphic love scenes will be disappointed.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Catherine Mansure is married to former Berkeley radical and now foundation director Rick; they live on Rick's family's land, a vast tract south of San Francisco. Just as Rick contracts a post- polio syndrome that leaves him increasingly weakened, Catherine coincidentally meets a fiddle-playing, marijuana-growing local man, Henry Bascombe--and her physical attraction to him rolls over her like a typhoon. Bascombe's natural-man courtesy and poised humility contrast with world-burner Rick's mastery (even more accentuated when body-power seems to desert him). Throw in a small extended family--a son, Ben; Rick's old aunt, who owns the land just now; and Bascombe's own daughter--and you have an update of Lady Chatterley's Lover, one that is less idyll than subject to the repercussions of social ideology. Roper (Mexico Days, 1989; On Spider Creek, 1978, etc.)-- besides stuffing Rick's mouth full of sorehead men's-movement talk (``You monopolize all right feeling, you dominate the culture, control the spiritual airwaves completely. And yet you want our constant attention, too. Why there's nothing left, really nothing at all. The answer to `What does woman want?' is everything--more than everything, much more'')--has given Bascombe and Catherine so little palpability that you often forget you're reading a novel and take all this for an essay on modern sexual manners, done in broad, magisterial, generalized sweeps. As a writer, Roper is a smart, long-view abstractionist--but he's swung too far in the other direction from Lawrence's embarrassing, squishy rhapsody and given us instead a diagnostic lecture. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rick and Catherine Mansure, former Berkeley radicals, currently live a life of luxury on a vast estate owned by Rick's aunt. Just as Rick is struck down by a mysterious illness, Catherine begins a passionate affair with a rustic marijuana farmer. Novelist Roper gives the book a reflexive spin by introducing a secondary character who is rewriting Lady Chatterley's Lover to prove that not even cynical postmoderns are immune to old-fashioned romance. The Trespassers is itself a reworking of D.H. Lawrence's classic, but if Roper is offering his ponderous and cliche-ridden prose as an alternative to postmodern irony, he can expect few takers. Particularly annoying is his habit of having characters address each other by name in every line of dialog, a stylistic quirk that leaves the reader begging for mercy. Fans of Lady Chatterley should stick with the original.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.