Word: murderers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...inconclusive questions of human existence. Ilana's narration greets, and scares, the reader first. Ilana is a woman of the old country, probably Russia, who somehow falls in love with a stranger and finds herself in an unnamed American city. Her journey comprises stories of rape and incest, murder and solicitation, placed in a mythical context of forests and magic. A "man in the forest laughing with little pointed teeth" violates her, yet gives her a Faberge egg. This egg becomes the metaphor for Ilana's life and spirituality, though the connection remains weak due to Budnitz's style problems...
...Mara is compulsive, jealous, hyper-analytical and destructive. She "walks as if the floor is thin ice. She checks beneath the cushion of a chair before sitting; she counts the knives in the silverware drawer." Through Mara, Budnitz explicates mental illness and the rationality of murder. This is too ambitious for her plot and narrative, especially given Mara's stream-of-consciousness rants. Had the rest of the novel not been so richly descriptive, this technique might have been effective. Instead, each thought staggers, laden with a false sense of importance and significance...
...aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder last October played out - culminating Thursday with the sentencing of Aaron McKinney to two life sentences - an equally disgusting crime was committed in Arkansas, where two men raped and killed a 13-year-old boy. That incident received relatively little coverage, while Shepard leaves a story that will probably endure for years to come as a symbol of intolerance and lowest-common-denominator conformity...
...What was that story we supposedly buried? According to news reports - and there were indeed news reports, both locally and on the national newswires - Davis Don Carpenter, 38, and Joshua Macave Brown, 22, from Benton County, Ark., participated in the rape and murder of Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old from Prairie Grove. Brown strapped the boy to a mattress and stuffed underwear in his mouth, held in place with a bandanna, and repeatedly sodomized him while Carpenter watched. The boy died from asphyxiation...
...reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men. There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators. To be somehow equated with these monsters would be a bitter legacy indeed for Matthew Shepard...