If you go down to the woods today… That is the starting point for Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, who grew up on Hoodoo mountain in the Idaho panhandle. A family — mother Jenny, father Wade, daughters May and June — leave their little house in the big woods and drive a pick-up truck to a clearing where they chop birch wood, squabble and drink lemonade that attracts the flies. You want them to find something wonderful there. A teddy bears’ picnic. A magic faraway tree. A Piglet. But this is Idaho, not our friendly day-tripping woods.
Nature is vast and hostile. In winter the house is cut off for months at a time, the paths too steep for a snowplough. In summer you sweat and sweat and tempers frazzle. Leave the windows open and the beetles get in. Then the spiders, hornets, horseflies, mice, garter snakes and katydid bush crickets. In the night, coyotes scream. Families make homes in trailers and on lonely farms, but there is a sense that man is only one howl away from wildness. When the heat and flies and jealousy and suspicion become too much for Jenny, she does something awful and irreparable.
Ruskovich moves through time: the day in the woods, the months and years before, the aftermath. Objects are returned to again and again as we piece together the evidence: the Styrofoam lemonade cups, the deerskin gloves to protect against splinters, the hatchet.
It is two parts Donna Tartt, one part Daphne du Maurier. Ruskovich shares the former’s unnerving knack for isolating her characters — on a New England campus, in small-town Mississippi — and the latter’s for psychological suspense and hauntings. Wade’s second wife Ann is obsessed with the day in the woods, sitting alone in the truck trying to understand what Jenny did. Shades of the second Mrs de Winter.
It is a strange, uncanny novel, bewitching and heady.
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