THE POINT OF FRACTURE
By Frank Turner Hollon
MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, 2005, 250 pages'All we can learn about people is usually what they let us learn, and all they can let us learn is what they understand.’
What any novelist surely must learn to do is resist lecturing. The best fiction doesn’t tell us how to live; it helps us discover how to do so. It doesn’t tell us what is truth; it helps us find our own.
And that’s what Frank Turner Hollon, who lives in Baldwin County, Ala., does in his every book. “The Pains of April” does so through an old man in a rest home. “The God File” does so through a murderer on Death Row. “A Thin Difference,” through a defense lawyer. “Life is a Strange Place,” through a man who has, he thinks, lost the best part of himself.
Each of these previous novels, however, seem merely stops on the road to “The Point of Fracture,” easily Hollon’s most accomplished, possibly his best, novel to date. He still writes his characteristically brief chapters. He still is able to realize a character succinctly: “He looked like a man waiting at a bus station for no one.” And he reminds us of just how hard it is to find a rewarding life.
This new novel is absolutely astonishing. Using the courtroom thriller as its structure, “The Point of Fracture” goes in unexpected directions, as an accused murderer — and those around him — learn of life’s vagaries and apprehend that any solutions life can offer come at a discomfiting price.
Michael Brace and his wife Suzanne live in south Alabama and have been married for 15 years. He has had a promising short story published, but has yet to have completed anything else. Suzanne waves goodbye to him from the door of their home, seemingly the understanding wife. But truth has a way of making itself known.
It seems that Michael has completed only a meager few chapters of a very personal novel he has been working on for years (and that he is unaware his wife has read). Suzanne, survivor of a brutal childhood, is unhappy in their marriage, and, though she is actually responsible for them, injuries indicate to others that Michael has been abusing her. When Suzanne is found dead from a gunshot, her husband cowering at her side, Michael is accused of the murder.
Only we know the complete truth of both the marriage and the murder. And that truth is of no help in defending Michael; for we can do nothing save watch events unfold. And that is exactly what “The Point of Fracture” is about, our powerlessness. Suzanne’s doctor can do nothing but report what she sees as truth, though we know it is not. Even Michael’s brother Phillip, a highly regarded trial lawyer, is unable to defend his brother. In fact, Phillip will have to face the truth about himself before he can offer any solace to Michael.
A kind of deliverance comes not from Jerry, the street person who offers a solution at the end of the novel, but from Michael himself, whose actual — and more importantly — personal trial allows him to uncover a primal truth: he tells his mother, “ ‘It’s better to understand, and lose your freedom, than to have all the freedom God can give and not know the difference.’” That thin difference is at the heart of “The Point of Fracture.”
Frank Turner Hollon writes of that difference with a passionate regard for us all. He wants us to understand that difference. It is an imperative, for it is the one certainty that binds us each to the other. As he reminds us late in the novel, “the souls of men are touched by different hands.”
Steven Whitton is a Professor of English at Jacksonville State University.
