The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Make Believe by Joanna ScottTrey Strecker
Joanna Scott. Make Believe. Little, Brown, 2000. 246 pp. $23.95.
“All images had stories to tell, causes to explain.” Joanna Scott’s new novel opens with the image of three-year-old Bo Templin, helplessly dangling from his seat belt in an overturned car after the accident that killed his young mother. Disoriented in this “upside-down world,” the novel’s orphaned protagonist creatively navigates the uncertain terrain between dream and waking, magic and reality, as he struggles to understand the confusion that surrounds him. Scott masterfully balances the perfection of the child’s imaginative interior world with the errant turbulence of adult life as she unravels the complex, entangled stories of Bo and his surviving family. Radiating out from the central event of the accident, the novel’s point of view alternates between the past and present and between Bo and his adult guardians. On the surface, the story details a bitter custody dispute between Bo’s grandparents, but below the surface we can see Scott skillfully calculating the arcs of cause and effect that connect her characters’ lives. As Bo becomes aware of his identity in the adult world and confronts the emerging realization that he might be “someone in someone else’s story,” the child escapes into the fantastic make believe of angels, magic carpets, and cold, misty lakes. The contemporary setting of Make Believe might signal a departure from the nineteenth-century Gothicism of Scott’s earlier work; however, the somber, almost elegiac tone rippling throughout the book reflects a reality as mysterious and as treacherous as any. Scott’s brilliant prose resonates with awe at the wondrous “ability of life to sustain itself” and embraces the prismatic intricacy of our everyday world, “a confluence that would have to be called miraculous if each distinct part hadn’t been, on its own, so ordinary.” [Trey Strecker]