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Bo's fantastic, partial and instinctive understanding of his world is at once wholly innocent of and stimulated by the desires of the many adults who steer his fate -- and whose individual worldviews are likewise shaped by fantasy, partiality, bitter experience and instinctively camouflaged motivations. In Bo's estimation, Eddie, the stranger with whom he finds himself inexplicably living, "always looked like he wanted to be doing something different from whatever he was doing." When he catches a glimpse of his dead mother's face in grandmother Marge, Bo suddenly thinks himself "the victim of some terrible lie, having long ago been told a story about the whereabouts of his real mama and for all this time believing it to be the complete, undeniable truth."

Make Believe By Joanna Scott Little, Brown & Company, 224 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Bo's are the simple and often poignant truths of childhood. After the car accident, the hospital personnel conclude that Bo's shock at his mother's death has made him mute. In fact, Bo is sticking strictly to his mother's rule -- Never talk to strangers! -- for fear that his mother will be so angry she'll never return if he does speak. Scott reveals her sensitive instinct for childhood wisdom throughout her handling of Bo's character: His sense of himself in the world is both inflated and confused. He has a child's uncanny radar for friends and enemies, for appropriate adaptation and for self-inflicted harm. Bo reminds us, also, that our perception of time's unfolding evolves so noticeably as we age and yet never really changes: A toy sheriff's star is lost and "There is only now, luckless empty now." Moments later a toy is found, and Bo is jubilant, his good fortune returned, "his head pounding with the colorful blur of the here and now."

Scott captures each of the novel's primary characters with equal precision and subtlety. She trusts in her own sensitive meter for human perversity and mood shift to further inform their personalities -- a trick often hard to pull off in fiction without confusing readers about the "true" nature of the players. Benumbed Marge, for instance, who has spent decades allowing Eddie to dictate her every decision and thought, finds secret pleasure in accusing her upstanding husband of sleazy behavior and watching him spin furiously with indignation, even after she recognizes that he is innocent of that particular brand of wrongdoing. Kamon is finely drawn as a talented, responsible man-child packed with all of the conflicting emotions and urges of late adolescence: arrogance, amazement, sloppiness -- reciting lines from Shakespeare one minute and smugly taking advantage of his cousin's stupidity and laziness the next. Then there's Eddie: Well, Eddie is the kind of person who gives humorless, Bible-thumping stepfathers a bad name.

Yet with all of its vividness and flashes of insight, "Make Believe" has some serious problems, all of which can be traced to rickety plotting and the attempt to mask it. Because Scott chose not to include the custody hearing in the book, Bo's removal from the Gilberts hangs on a book the widowed judge read: "The novel irritated him, and his irritation made possible an irritating acceptance of the significance of matrilineage."

That seems believable in itself, since it's not hard to imagine that a family court judge's decision could be swayed by such unconscious forces. But considered alongside the novel's other crudely outlined coincidences -- a cousin just happens to have been arrested for drug possession on the Gilberts' front lawn making their home seem an unsavory environment for a child; the haziness of the medical malpractice situation itself; and the hospital informants who appear without warning to grease the wheels of litigation -- Bo's appearance in the home of Marge and Eddie ends up feeling forced.

And what of the Gilberts? Bo's paternal grandparents are passionate enough about Bo that they make an abortive attempt to flee with him, and yet they seem to never take a legal stand by asking to raise their adored grandson; instead, they relinquish him without so much as a peep. Scott drops hints that their passivity is based on a conviction that the white grandparents will invariably win any courtroom struggle, but race is such a nonissue in this novel (except, perhaps, to Eddie) that the hinting itself feels disingenuous. Disingenuous, too, is the feel of some of the dialogue. Scott is typically dead-on in creating voices for her characters, but here the dialogue often feels stilted, forced or coy: Even the characters don't seem to believe what they're given to say.

With "Make Believe," it seems almost as if Scott has stretched for herself too small a canvas; you can feel her (in her long, evocative lists of free-floating daily awareness, or in her focused monographs on the minutiae of costume, food and habit) breaking out of the story at its edges.

With these reservations noted, the sheer force of Scott's storytelling impulse coupled with the depth of her characters sustains her novel, and her readers, to its conclusion. In a fateful moment late in the story, when Bo has escaped out onto the disintegrating ice of the lake and a devastated Marge flees her complacency and her husband in order to save the little boy, her plaintive, sincere plea to Bo to "please believe me" reverberates in the heart of the reader. "Please believe me" -- it carries with it all of the desire, disappointment, hope and hopelessness that flood our own unanswerable prayers. It reminds us that this is still a Joanna Scott novel. We feel then, at the book's ending, a bit like Bo -- happy to be there, though vaguely confused. While it is not her strongest book, with "Make Believe" Scott still convinces her readers that they could do a lot worse than to spend a few hours inside her mind. She can and does make you believe.
salon.com | March 2, 2000

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