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- The Road to Vermillion Lake Reviewed by Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
The Road to Vermillion Lake Reviewed by Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
- By Wally Wood
- Published April 17, 2018
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
Wally Wood
Reviewer Wally Wood: Wally is an editor and writer, has published three novels, Getting Oriented:A Novel about Japan, The Girl in the Photo and Death in a Family Business. He obtained his MA in creative writing in 2002 from the City University of New York and has worked with a number of authors as a ghostwriter and collaborator.
With an extensive background in a variety of business subjects, his credits include twenty-one nonfiction books. He spent twenty-five years as a trade magazine reporter and editor and has been a volunteer writing and business teacher in state and federal prisons for more than twenty years. He has finished his fourth novel and has translated a collection of Japanese short stories into English.
Author: Vic Cavalli
Publisher: Harvard Square Editions
ISBN: 978-1-941861-40-0
My on-screen dictionary
defines "symbol" as "a thing that represents or stands
for something else, especially a material object representing
something abstract: the limousine was another symbol of his
wealth and authority." I've been thinking about this because
the blurb on the back of Vic Cavalli's novel, The Road to
Vermillion Lake, says that the "greatest strength of this
work lies in the author's sure handling of the symbolic
landscape." I'm not sure what that means, nor am I sure, having
read the book, that there is "a highly suggestive internal
movement, governed by a set of symbols linking the subjective and
objective worlds." I've wondered about readers who find
symbols in my writing. If I did not intend a landscape or a character
to represent something abstract, is it really a symbol? Without
asking the author what he/she intended, we're on our own. In any
case, I found The Road to Vermillion Lake to be an
interesting effort.
The story is narrated throughout by Tom
Tems, who at the beginning of the novel is a blaster's helper and
first-aid attendant. The company cuts a road through the
Canadian Rockies to pristine Vermillion Lake where a developer is
constructing a resort village designed by Ms. Johnny Nostal, an
environmental architect from New York who turns out to be 25 years
old and gorgeous—red hair, green eyes. Tom and Johnny meet
when she visits the job site (she is, after all, responsible for the
entire project) and on their second evening together she informs
him she is a virgin and, "If we end up getting married, it will
be in the Catholic Church and our kids will be raised Catholic.
That's not negotiable."
There is a complication, however.
Johnny has a sister Sally. Tom had exchanged some chaste kisses with
Sally on the road to Vermillion Lake, but Sally has disappeared.
Apparently, on her way to see Tom, she was killed in one of the
blasts set off to build the road.
But no. She was injured
and has lost her memory. She doesn't know who she is, that she has a
sister, that she planned to spend quiet time in a convent after
visiting Tom, or that she's been romanced by Tom's friend Dave. Once
she's been identified, the best thing for her is to go to New
York and live with Johnny, perhaps to recover her memory.
Tom
suggests that Vermillion Lake Village could offer residents a
shooting range. And not one range but three designed
for international big-money competition. The money people agree
this is a good idea and halfway through the book Tom buys a "Sako TRG
42 .338 Lupua Mag rifle (topped with a state of the art Mark 4 ER/T
8.5-25x50mm Leupold scope)" and all the equipment he needs
to load his own cartridges with "Sierra 250 grain Hollow Point
Boat Talk MatchKing" bullets. Out on the range he's able to put
20 shots into a pattern the size of an apple at 1,000 meters. (When
he visits Johnny's mother in South Bend, Indian, for her approval
of the wedding, she is delighted to learn that "You own and
shoot a Sako TRG 42 .338 Lupua Mag rifle? . . . You have my
blessing, Tom.")
Tom's friend Dave who had been
chasing Sally switched his attentions to Carol, "around 24 or
25, maybe 5'6" tall, long blonde disheveled hair, very
attractive face with heavy makeup, especially large eyelashes and
bright red lipstick, firm natural breasts under a tiny pink tank
top, and super-short blue jean cutoffs . . . " Dave however has
apparently died from an overdose and when Tom breaks this news
to Carol, she comes on to him, indeed comes close enough that he can
read the heart-shaped medallion between her breasts: "I
swallow."
Not only does he reject Carol's
invitation to "a promise of certain pleasure," he
introduces her to the woman he loves and Carol and Johnny become
fast friends. Tom's fortitude in resisting Carol gives Johnny one
more reason to trust and love him. He is someone who needs a
good woman. He had a difficult childhood: "I remember sitting at
our white, swirled veneer kitchen table, the fly tape hanging
like an impotent noose over the sticky counter, the bare hot-white
bulb swaying slightly on a chain cord above us, the vehicles
below us on Plier Avenue growling by in clusters through the
snow—leaving cylinders of silence—and my drunk mother
explaining . . . " how his drunken father vanished from their
lives.
We don't learn a lot about the landscape. Vermillion
Lake is in the mountains and over the course of the novel seismic
activity shakes down granite boulders disrupting work on the
development. Toward the end of the book a volcano erupts to form an
island in the lake, which, now that I think about it, might
symbolize—or echo—Tom and Johnny's sexual activity. The Road
to Vermillion Lake may not be for everyone, but it has
provoked more thought than many of the novels I've read recently.