The Slow Moon: A Novel - Hardcover

Cox, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679463283 ISBN 13: 9780679463283

Publisher: Random House, 2006

Synopsis

On an early spring night in 1991, Sophie and Crow, flushed with anticipation, slip away from a rowdy high school party and sneak off into the woods. Tonight, for the first time, they will make love. An hour later, Sophie lies unconscious, covered with blood, and Crow is crashing through the underbrush, hurling himself into the river to escape the police. . . .

What was meant to be an idyllic, intimate evening has turned into a nightmare. Despite Crow’s frantic claims of innocence, evidence at the scene suggests his guilt. And Sophie, by now awake in the hospital, refuses to speak, leaving the residents of the couple’s seemingly placid Tennessee town to draw their own wildly varying conclusions.
If Crow isn’t to blame, then who assaulted Sophie, and what compelled Crow to flee? With each answer comes a new set of questions. Elizabeth Cox’s vibrant and lyrical narrative revisits the events leading up to the fateful night, then shows how the tragedy reverberates throughout the community, among parents, friends, teachers, and neighbors–all connected to the young lovers, all with a stake in what happens next. As growing suspicions divide the town, a closer look reveals that everyone has something to hide.

A compelling and passionate page-turner, The Slow Moon waxes full with suspense, a haunting story of innocence lost, lives betrayed, and the courage required to face the truth.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Cox is the author of Night Talk, The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love, Familiar Ground, and the story collection Bargains in the Real World. She is an instructor at the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars and teaches at Wofford College in South Carolina, where she shares the John Cobb Chair of the Humanities with her husband, C. Michael Curtis. She lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Reviews

Adult/High School–In a voice reminiscent of Alice Hoffman's, Cox weaves a story of love, sex, and scandal in a small Southern town. She deals with the issues of rape and infidelity thoughtfully and sensitively. Like people in many small towns, the folks of South Pittsburg, TN, have known one another for too long. They believe that there is nothing new to learn–until Sophie and Rita Chabot move in. Everyone at the local high school has a thing for Sophie. She is beautiful, artistic, and friendly. Rita, her newly widowed mother, is a provocative influence on both the men and their wives at the local hardware store. Change is good until the teen is brutally gang-raped after a party. And so starts a complicated tale of hidden truths, lost love, and enduring spirit. Cox's portrayal of awkward first love carries the novel beyond its dark subject matter, invoking, as does life, both grief and cheer. Told nonlinearly, the story focuses on the characters, leaving readers to try to predict who committed the vicious crime. Teens will be drawn to Sophie, her boyfriend, and the members of his band. Many will recognize, if not themselves, then people they know in real life.–Brigeen Radoicich, Fresno County Office of Education, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Any novel that begins with the rape and beating of a 14-year- old girl will be haunted by the ghost of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. But in the supernatural world of book marketing, that's a curse most publishers would die for. The Slow Moon, a new novel by Elizabeth Cox, contains several significant differences from Sebold's phenomenal 2002 bestseller (for one, there's no spectral narrator), but its insight into the emotional turmoil of teens and their parents in the wake of a terrifying crime should entrance a similar audience.

The story opens on the night that Sophie Chabot, a freshman new to South Pittsburgh, Tenn., and Crow Davenport, her wealthy 16-year-old boyfriend, decide to have sex for the first time. After they sneak away from a wild party at a friend's house and lie down in the woods, Crow realizes that he has left the condom in his car. During the 20 minutes it takes him to sneak back and return, Sophie is gang-raped and beaten unconscious. At the sight of her body, in a moment of panic that will dismay him throughout the novel, Crow runs away, convinced he'll be held responsible if he calls for help.

This gripping first scene pulls us through shifting emotions of romance, excitement, terror and dread. But what's more remarkable is that events over the following months are equally enthralling, even though Cox closes all the natural avenues of suspense: We know from the start that Crow isn't one of the culprits, the police search for Sophie's real assailants never comes into focus, and even the criminal trial breezes by in a few pages. But as Sophie recovers in the hospital, unable to recall anything about her attack, bottled-up tensions and secrets in this small town begin to ferment into an explosive mixture.

I know this sounds a bit overwrought, but except for a few dashes of melodrama ("Something monstrous was moving beneath the skin of the town"), Cox writes in a lyrical voice that gently explains the smothered anguish of these people's lives. She's most insightful when she moves through Crow's buddies, one by one, laying bare their conflicted souls: their desperation to belong, to maintain their parents' love, to score. She catches the animal energy of "these eager boys who thought they were, but were not yet, men." It's a painful process, for the boys and the people around them. "They didn't want to think about the price it took to be men," Cox writes, "wanting instead to be the blaze, the rage, the danger they thought were men."

Bobby, the son of a local judge, sports the charming confidence no girl can resist, even though there's something unsettling about him -- that blink-of-the-eye vacillation between aggression and flattery. If you're the parent of a teenage girl, you need to know about Bobby; your daughter already does. Meanwhile, Lester, the brainiac in the group, is torn between his basic decency and that nagging thirst for his friends' respect, which, unfortunately, is earned by excessive drinking and acquiring good-looking girls.

But that points to a peculiar failure in The Slow Moon: The good-looking girl at the center of this story is eclipsed by the characters around her. Sophie often doesn't seem like someone who's been gang-raped and beaten; she seems more like a girl who's had her bike stolen. For better or worse, the extraordinary openness about sexual trauma over the past few decades has given most of us some sense of the scars left by such abuse and the agonizing path to recovery for those who survive. But Sophie never shows sufficient evidence of the struggle such an ordeal would entail. Her doctor drops little fortune cookies of advice: "He says I need to let myself remember before I can forget." And she adopts a sweet attitude no one could fault: "Each day she rose with a singularity of purpose: to find some small brightness in the day, just one moment, so that she could begin to reenter the world." But there simply isn't enough psychological complexity here to make her convincing. An erotic epiphany in the woods toward the end of the novel -- "The moon was taking off its clothes, making a deal with her" -- sounds particularly false (although it's still better than the ghost-girl sex scene that mars the end of The Lovely Bones).

Cox sees deeper when she looks away from Sophie to the fragile structures of desire and deceit in the community, which for too many of us will be distressingly familiar. Amid disturbing stories in the news, such as the rape case involving Duke University lacrosse players, The Slow Moon is all the more relevant and necessary, a careful map of the fissures that run through seemingly well-built families.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Cox's carefully wrought latest (following Familiar Ground) delineates the heartbreaking cruelty that sunders a group of adolescent friends in a small Tennessee town. During a late-night party, high school sweethearts Sophie and Crow go off into the woods. When Crow leaves Sophie for 20 minutes to fetch a condom, she's raped and beaten by a group of boys she will not be able to identify after the trauma. To the shock of the town, Crow, known to be a fine and upstanding young man, is charged with her attack. Cox painstakingly enters the consciousness of the various characters who have a stake in Crow's fate, including his diffident, religious mother, Helen, and adulterous stepfather, Carl; Crow's younger brother, Johnny, who struggles to come to terms with his homosexual attraction for Tom, one of the boys in Crow's band; the judge adjudicating Crow's case, Aurelia Bailey, who has to manage her own troubled teenage boy, Bobbie; and other teens and townsfolk. The fact of Crow's innocence is plain to all, yet no one moves to defend him, not even Sophie, who claims she can't remember what happened. Cox stands back and lets the truth emerge with quiet determination. (Aug. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In a small town in Tennessee, Sophie Chabot is the new girl in town, beautiful and with the added allure of having a French Canadian father, a forest ranger who died on the job in Glacier Park, Montana. Several of the town's young men are interested, but Sophie is attracted to Crow, a guitarist in a local rock band and a member of the town's most prominent family. After a raucous party, Sophie is sexually attacked in the woods and so badly beaten she is shocked into amnesia. Crow's arrest as a suspect sets the town to discussing the likelihood of his guilt or innocence, provoking suspicion of others, and revealing underlying fault lines in a number of relationships that seem solid on the surface. Cox shifts back and forward in time to tell of how newcomers make their home in an insular town and innocence is lost as painful secrets are revealed. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One

So on that April evening in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, with spring just beginning, a copper moon rose, balanced like a huge persimmon, and two young teenagers, Crow Davenport and his girl Sophie, left a party and walked into the woods toward the river to be alone. They were quiet as they walked.

“You okay?” Crow asked her. They had already talked about what they would do tonight.

“I keep thinking somebody’s following us,” said Sophie. Her voice sounded thrilled, expectant.

“Who would follow us?” said Crow.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to do this?” Crow felt eager but would acquiesce if Sophie changed her mind.

“No. I do.” She looked around. “I do want to.”

“Then what’s the matter?” said Crow. He carried a small blanket from the house under his arm.

“Don’t you hear something?” Sophie asked.

“An owl, maybe.” They kept walking. Crow put his arm around her waist and pushed tree limbs away from her head.

“Wish I could see it,” said Sophie.

“Yeah.” Crow began to rub her shoulders, touching her long dark hair.

“If I could see it, I’d draw it,” she told him.

Sophie’s school notebooks were filled with drawings, and even though those drawings were not the first thing Crow had noticed, her notebook was something he could ask her about. Their first conversation was about how well she could draw.

“Right now?” he asked. “You’d want to draw something now?” He leaned her body against a tree and kissed her. He had kissed her the first time in her house, the odor of honeysuckle coming in like mist. They had heard a dog barking across the street. Crow had shown Sophie a slick gray stone that he carried in his pocket and asked if she liked it. She said she did, so he gave it to her, then kissed her on the lips, barely—a wing of moth.

But his desire to kiss her now felt urgent. Wind chimes hung on porches, sounding like temple bells.

“Let’s stay here,” said Sophie, and she led him deeper into the trees. And for a short while the night seemed to stop. “Put the blanket down,” she urged. “We can lie on these leaves.”

Here, at the mouth of a creek leading to the Tennessee River, in early evening, near the home where the Fairchilds lived—both parents away—a party was going on, alive with teenage bodies and hard music. But these two had wandered away from the party. Their love for each other made them feel separate from the others, better.

The day had been warm, with a brief rain, and the air hung like blue milk.

“Nobody’ll see us,” Crow tried to reassure himself. “Most everybody’s drunk by now anyway, or stoned.”

“I feel a little drunk myself,” Sophie confessed.

“You’re not used to it,” Crow said.

“Well, that part’s true.”

“Sophie,” he said, and kissed her again. He had not kissed her like this before. The creek widened, and from where they sat they heard water lap against the banks of sand and river foam. With no adults around, their dreams of pale longing increased in size. They believed they were grown. Flashes of heat lightning flickered, made them dizzy.

Sophie stepped backward, laughing. Flushed with pleasure, she caught Crow’s arm and said, “Let’s lie down.”

Crow pulled her onto the blanket. He put his arm around her, and they sat listening to the woods around them.

“I heard something,” Crow said, pulling back.

Sophie looked startled and turned toward the river. She was sitting with one leg up, her chin resting on her knee. Her skin downy white with a mole beside her ear at the hairline. To Crow, looking at her, nothing seemed diminished, nothing seemed small or uninteresting.

“I’m just kidding.” He tousled her hair.

Sophie stretched her neck like a cat about to purr.

“You want to go on down closer to the river?” he asked.

“No.” Sophie touched his leg.

“You want to stay here?”

Then she did something Crow had not imagined her doing, or rather imagined himself doing for her. She began to unbutton her shirt, fumbling. She leaned forward and removed it, unhooked her bra. Pieces of white cloth moved down her arms. She seemed like someone in a movie, her glossy hair, the line of her cheek. The wind scuttled through the trees, riffling the leaves. Crow could not believe her skin shining in the dark. For a moment he did not move, then she reached to unbutton his shirt.

Crow’s chest and arms were big-muscled. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a strong, manly appearance that made girls hum with pleasure when they saw him for the first time.

Sophie settled into a comfortable position.

They kissed each other carefully, as if handling a glass object. He pulled her skirt off, and as he kissed her breasts, her nipples grew hard.

“Sophie,” Crow whispered. Her hair spread on the ground, her face open, his hand on her breast. Then he rose above her. “Sophie. Sophie.” He shuddered with desire.

“I know,” she told him, but she looked uneasy. “Have you ever done this before?” Her voice sounded shaky.

“Not really,” he told her. “I mean, not like this.”

She didn’t ask what he meant.

The only other time Crow had had a woman was down by the railroad tracks when Tom, Casey, and Bobby paid for Eileen’s services on his fifteenth birthday. They gave him five condoms. The woman was thirty-something, and she cost fifty dollars. He hadn’t liked it as much as he thought he would, but he liked it enough to think of her every night for two weeks afterward. The best part being that his friends knew he was no longer a virgin. He wouldn’t tell Sophie about Eileen, but he was glad to feel the confidence of experience.

“Have you?” He didn’t think she had. He felt caught by the perfume of her body.

She let him stroke her arms and legs. She made him feel slow-witted. As Crow moved on top of her, she parted her legs slightly, willing. She did not urge him to wait or stop. He touched her thighs, between her thighs. He looked at her white, papery skin and the thick tuft of dark hair. When Crow looked back at her face, her mouth seemed edgy, and a hot-blooded certainty came running toward him like a horse.

For a long while they urged each other with odd angles of arms and legs, a wild symmetry of touch and whisperings that moved them into a mood of perfect order.

“I want to go inside you.” His words were a question, but he was almost inside her already, pushing. Sophie did not resist, but then said, “Wait, wait.”

“No, please. Let me. Sophie, please.”

“Do you have something, Crow? Aren’t you going to use something?”

“Shit.” He seemed awake now.

“What?”

“Oh, shit. I think I came a little bit.”

“But don’t you have something?” They had talked about using something the first time.

“It’s in the car. In the glove compartment.”

“I think we should—”

“Okay.” He cursed himself for leaving the condom behind. “I’ll get it.” He leapt up, pulled on his underwear. The car was parked down the street in a church parking lot. No one had parked in the Fairchilds’ driveway.

“Hurry,” Sophie said. She looked trembly, but determined.

“I will.” He laughed and slipped on his shoes. “I will.” He left his shirt, pants, and wallet in a pile on the ground.

“Your shirt,” Sophie whispered. “You forgot your shirt.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “This won’t take long.” Sophie covered herself with his shirt and pulled on her panties.

Crow hurried through the woods toward the parking lot. There must have been ten cars parked there. He found his car, opened the glove compartment, and grabbed the package of condoms. For one brief instant he wondered if they should go through with this. He already felt foolish. But Sophie was waiting for him. Her hair and mouth, her skin that smelled like oranges. He started toward the woods.

But at that moment he heard a pickup drive into the lot, a group of girls laughing. He ducked down beside the car. When they laughed, he thought they had seen him in his underwear, were going to make fun of him, but they were only teasing each other. They got out of the truck and lit cigarettes. He was going to have to stay until they left. He recognized their voices.

The girls took their time. Crow cursed his bad luck and waited. His legs began to cramp from squatting. The girls laughed louder, lit more cigarettes. Sophie would wonder what was taking him so long. After what seemed a long while, Crow decided to risk embarrassment; but just then one of the girls grew impatient and began to urge everyone toward the house.

Crow stumbled into the woods. He pictured Sophie’s face, her long legs. He could hardly wait to touch her again, and grew excited even while running. But when he got to the place where they h...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679463283
• ISBN 13: 9780679463283
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 299