A Brave Teen Adrift in a Skewed World

So many novels present us with characters who are--bewilderingly--predictable yet unbelievable. In “Colony Girl,” Thomas Rayfiel turns this unfortunate formula on its head. His protagonist and narrator, Eve, is utterly original, indeed sui generis. Yet at every moment, Eve is absolutely credible; she has all the qualities of an authentic person, albeit one you have never met before. Eve shows us just what a writer with a truthful imagination can achieve; she is the triumph at the heart of this marvelous new novel.

Eve is 15, and like many teenagers, she loathes herself: “I was awkward. I was gauche. People hated me on sight. . . . I was this terrible mistake.” She is a “scuttling weirdo” who feels “like I had been chosen for some lab experiment in total humiliation.”

But unlike most teens, Eve has been raised in a tiny, isolated enclave of fundamentalist Christians in Iowa. Eve’s sect is defined by negatives: Its members have no last names, no telephones, no electricity, no cars, no money and, of course, no freedom and no choices.

“I have spent my whole life not dancing,” Eve explains to an outsider. “That’s what we do out at the Colony. We don’t dance, all day and all night.”

The sect’s spiritual leader is Gordon, a Mao-quoting, “Mod Squad”-watching, Demerol-popping fraud. Long ago, Gordon and Eve’s mother were lovers, and Eve suspects that Gordon is her father; not surprisingly, her feelings for him range from hatred to awe.

“All relationships ran through Gordon,” Eve explains. “We all feared and craved him. Alone, one-on-one, we were just a bunch of cripples.”

But it is her best friend, Serena, for whom Eve reserves her greatest passion: “She wasn’t slow and dead to things the way the adults were. . . . She would be beautiful one day, but no one else could see it.”

When Gordon does see that beauty--when, in fact, he decides to marry Serena--Eve’s world begins to splinter and then explode.

It is a sign of “Colony Girl’s” confident loopiness that the reader has no trouble accepting Eve’s simultaneous involvement with Joey Biswanger, a classmate to whom she is wildly attracted, and his sad-sack father, Herb.

“They were just two aspects of the same thing,” Eve reasons. “It was just a question of which one I would end up with.”

But Eve’s most intense relationship is with her mother, a cold beauty who was formerly a druggie and a whore. Gordon has rescued her from her sins--has rescued her, in fact, from the burden of being.

Now she is spacey, “tranced out,” docile; she has arrived at a place “past people, past events, past her own emotions even.” She is, of course, past passion: “Mother had extinguished her flame. . . . That was her great accomplishment.”

And it is a sign of Rayfiel’s courage that he consistently sidesteps sentimentality in favor of something fresher and more troubling. Late in the book, Eve tells her mother that she needs more love, and her mother seems, finally, to listen. But the big reconciliation scene--that “Oprah” moment of teary warmth--does not quite materialize.

“Then she opened her arms and took me in,” Eve recounts. “But now that it was happening, I was totally unmoved. She hugged me so tight, and cried and cried, and a funny thing began to happen. I felt her coolness passing over into me. Her cold, critical approach to life. I felt my body taking it on. It gave me strength.”

How do you become a human being when you’ve been taught that your very essence is a sin? This is one of the many interesting questions this often hilarious, always robust novel poses. The question is never definitively settled--Eve is clearly a work in progress, but Rayfiel gives us reason to believe that she may figure out an answer. When Gordon reiterates the importance of fighting desire, Eve responds, “I don’t think so, Gordon. I think I want to go with my desires for a while. . . . Desires are pretty much all I have.”