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🦋 Pilgrim and Stranger
Stranger Here Below is a little devious in its rendering of characters in the shifts of focus, Hinnefeld likes to lull you in to thinking of the other characters as fitting comfortably into the  background of whatever character's story is currently in focus. Here is a switch of focus reminding the reader suddenly that Maze is still in the foreground, when you've gotten used to tracking Mary Elizabeth's story:
The bus ride up from Lexington had been miserable. Endless and miserable. By the time she got to Indianapolis, she had a sharp, stabbing pain that ran up her right side, from her ankle to her armpit, and no matter how she shifted in the crowded seat, she couldn't get comfortable. Sciatica. Vista'd had it, too, she'd said, when she was pregnant. But Maze wouldn't touch any of the herbal remedies Vista or Georgia tried to get down her. She didn't trust either of those disappointed women.
That reminder of the complexities in her relationships with her mother and Georgia brings her suddenly into focus -- this is the beginning of one of the most dramatic confrontations of the novel (in which much of the conflict has been repressed or sub rosa), between the Pilgrim and the Stranger.
posted afternoon of Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
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