Jonathan J. Clarke
Rebecca Donner. Sunset Terrace. MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2003.
Hardcover, 311 pp. $22.00
This fine first novel, set in Los Angeles in 1983, examines at close
range the intimate joys and harrowing risks of a childhood lived on
the social margins. Like many migrants before her, 10-year old
Hannah Kierson arrives in Southern California reeling from personal
tragedy but dreaming of new beginnings and of a brighter, more
hopeful life. Yet when Hannah, her mother Elaine, and younger sister
Daisy move into a sun-stroked housing complex in South Santa
Monica, they find that things are tough all over. Sunset Terrace is an
unsentimental chronicle of California dreams deferred, the despera-
tion of lives lived just outside the frame.
For the Kiersons, Sunset Terrace is the most recent in a series
of stops on a disorderly cross-country tour begun after Hannah’s
father’s suicide. His death has pushed the family to the economic
margins—Elaine makes a slender living as a cook—and an atmos-
phere of straitened circumstances pervades. Engrossed in her
inner drama but aware of the damage being done to her children,
Hannah’s mother tries to invest the family’s flight with a sense of
adventure and possibility. Sadly, Hannah isn’t fooled. Sunset Terrace
is a place of forced intimacy whose tenants are stalked by the sordid
and the banal:
So far 1983 hadn’t been a particularly eventful year at
Sunset Terrace, except when Rich Jr. in apartment six
got sent to juvie for stealing the mail and Davy in
number four broke his arm doing 180s on his skate-
board by the dumpster.
Into Hannah’s lonely, itinerant life comes Bridget, a dirt-
streaked foundling formed in Sunset Terrace’s crucible of chaos and
neglect. In the opening scenes of Sunset Terrace, Donner presents
nine-year-old Bridget almost as a movie monster, rising out of her
environment of hot concrete and broken glass like a hydra-headed
creature from the primordial ooze. Other reviewers have tended to
see Bridget as an embodiment of evil, but to view Bridget only in
terms of her destructive capacity is to miss an important dimension
of this novel’s moral drama. Like all bad influences, Bridget taps into
a latent unconscious capacity for violence; she reveals Hannah to
herself. Though initially cautious, Hannah is attracted by Bridget’s
energy and reckless conviction. Bridget observes no limitations and
never turns down a dare, and she succeeds in goading Hannah into
ever more dangerous games. In the moral economy of childhood, it is
possible for Bridget to be the sort of heroine that we fear she will
never be as an adult—and it is from our anticipation of the fate that
awaits Bridget that her special poignancy stems.
But while Bridget is the more vivid character, it is Hannah
whose fate the novel seeks to resolve. Hannah’s family’s hard times
have accelerated her childhood, and Donner succeeds in convincing
us that what happens to her next may make all the difference. This is
not a novel packed with colorful incidents—the torpid environment
Donner creates for her characters makes almost any action seem
heroic, a middle-finger salute to indifferent gods—and it is this sense
of Hannah poised on a precipice that gives Sunset Terrace much of its
suspense. The plot, such as it is, is artfully drawn, and the climax
arrives with surprising force. From comparatively innocent begin-
nings, an atmosphere of menace builds convincingly to an act of vio-
lence that is both authentically shocking and true to the inner logic of
the story. Intelligence and luck eventually carry Hannah away to col-
lege and a safer realm of experience, but an epilogue in which the
adult Hannah returns to see Sunset Terrace destroyed underscores
the survivor’s guilt she feels even as the world is beginning to open
up to her. In fact, we cannot experience Hannah’s ultimate salvation
fully without acknowledging that it has come partly at Bridget’s
expense. Donner is appropriately circumspect about Bridget’s experi-
ence as a victim—a scene in which Bridget enacts the title role in a
game of “Stripper” is truly chilling—but it is clear these experiences
have also informed the harsh “lessons” Bridget has taught Hannah.
In some ways, Sunset Terrace seems most obviously descended
from two novels that deal more explicitly with the contrast between
the dream of L.A. and the reality: Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward
Bethlehem and Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust. But while Didion
pitches everything at the same high level of intensity, shoehorning
people and events into a powerful, highly-colored vision, and West is
somewhat archly satirical, Donner is less demagogic. She gives her
characters stature not by fixing them within a larger social drama,
but by assuming that their lives are important in themselves. In this
sense, and in its painful examination of a poor, white childhood,
Sunset Terrace is perhaps most reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s cele-
brated Bastard Out of Carolina. Donner has employed many of the
leitmotifs of Southern California literature without being held cap-
tive by them, and Sunset Terrace is persuasive in its depiction of time
and place without being merely regional fiction.
Sunset Terrace, like Bastard, is in some ways an angry book. We
sense that Donner’s characters, like Allison’s, have drifted beyond
the range of politics and into dangerous, unregulated territory. They
are no longer anyone’s constituents. But Donner is too much an artist
to settle for the merely didactic, and her novel carries its convictions
lightly. The way her characters are acted upon by their environment
may speak to the consequences of social inequality, but Donner
leaves the inferences to us, and the drama of Hannah’s circumstances
is always foremost a personal drama and only secondarily a social
one. Indeed, liberal California politics of the meliorist variety come
in for pointed ridicule:
The truth was [Elaine says of her earnest new boy-
friend], Sam had the ability to bore her to tears,
especially when he went on and on about politics.
But his eyes lit up with such gratitude when she
asked him political questions, and he responded to
them with such gusto, that she decided there were
worse sacrifices a woman could make for a man’s
happiness.
Donner’s Hannah is a careful observer, and in its most vivid
passages Sunset Terrace provides a child’s eye-level view of the physi-
cal world, capturing the thrill and menace of ordinary objects and
surfaces.
Gazing up at the ceiling, she blurred her eyes, mak-
ing the stucco smooth. Back in focus, the clustered
bumps re-emerged—haphazard, like sloppy Braille.
Her eyes, she imagined, were her fingertips, like a
blind girl’s, feeling the ceiling for the message of this
room with its thick smells, its mingling of hot paint
and old carpet.
If occasionally the descriptions seem rather dutiful—everything in
Hannah’s path receives the same thorough examination, which
sometimes has the effect of flattening rather than heightening our
perceptions—this is a problem of judgment and not of perception.
The eye is keen, and the judgment will come.
Hannah’s world is so thrilling, in fact, that when we move into
that of the novel’s adults there is a palpable drop in energy that
unfortunately is felt at the level of language as well as of incident.
Elaine is the picture of enervation, and though she is, in her way,
heroic—her husband’s illness and suicide have thrust greatness upon
her—she seems to have run out of answers. Bad luck has found her;
she has taken on the patina of a loser; the people she meets instinc-
tively treat her badly. Indeed, the family escapes not through Elaine’s
hard work as a cook but rather by an act of grace. It is possible to
complain that the adult characters of Sunset Terrace have too little
density, that they are not as fully-imagined as the children. On the
other hand, it is in part this near-absence of potent, credible adults
that makes it possible for Bridget to command so much of Hannah’s
attention and our own.
Literate fiction dealing with the inner lives of children presents
a challenge for both writer and reader. But Donner does her young
characters the service of taking them seriously, investing them with
self-awareness and the capacity for complex motivations, while writ-
ing with an asperity that keeps her clear of the maudlin and the trite.
Sunset Terrace is a promising debut.