Perspective: The resting place of tragedy

Of all the horrific images broadcast into our homes during the 1990s, from the collapse of the Santa Monica Freeway to the damage wreaked by Hurricane Andrew, perhaps the flooding of the Mississippi River best conveyed the terrifying magnitude of Mother Nature gone awry. Watching volunteers struggle heroically against the river's rising tide, one inevitably questioned the foolish hubris of humanity. We continue to build our homes in harms way, quickly forgetting the painful lessons of the past.

One of the costliest natural disasters in American history occurred on Memorial Day 1889, when the flood-plain hamlet of Johnstown, Pa., suffered a devastating blow. Due to heavy rains and improper maintenance, the South Fork Dam burst, sending 20-million tons of water rushing down the valley. As it gathered locomotives and homes in its wake, the water crested to a wave 70-feet high. In the end, the disaster would claim 2,209 lives.

In her chilling, generously imagined second novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden, Kathleen Cambor brings to life a cast of characters who, as we learn in a breathy preface, were forever altered by a bizarre collision of circumstance and carelessness. Rather than focus on the chaos and destruction of the flood itself, Cambor zeroes in on the lives it changed. She attempts -- at times movingly, at other moments awkwardly -- to draw larger truth from her characters' abbreviated lives. The result is a novel that interrogates our desire to find paradise on Earth and the ways fate can punish that desire.

In many ways, the late 19th century was a time when fate wantonly shaped the destinies of Americans. Industrial work was tough and costly. So, too, was illness. Cambor deftly portrays the emotional fallout from epidemics such as diphtheria and typhoid fever, how families cut their losses and folded into themselves, yet never fully swallowing their griefs. In Cambor's tale, the Fallons, a working-class family of four, find themselves reeling from personal calamities. After two of their children die from sickness, they place their hope in Daniel, their son, a studious young man preoccupied with the arrogant members of a gentleman's club near South Fork Dam.

As Daniel observes, the owners of the dam purposefully neglect their responsibility. Bought for a song by Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon and Andrew Carnegie, the ailing structure created a bucolic retreat for the barons: the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club. Black bass were shipped in at the cost of a dollar a fish to stock the lake. Sprawling "cottages" were constructed. Yet all of the members overlooked the dam's weaknesses. Cambor describes Mellon's attitude, a tad indelicately: "His people were at the clubhouse. He had no interest in imagining who lived below.'"

As it proceeds toward its inescapable climax, Cambor's novel acquires interesting wrinkles and twists of plot -- romances, betrayals, intimations of mortality -- yet it also develops fissures in plausibility, that patina of verisimilitude historical novels must maintain. In order to bridge scenes, she delivers mini-historical lectures. At one point she imparts that "[i]mpossible to miss in any city at that time was the talk of social change." Elsewhere, she opines "[i]t was a time when children were often treated thus." These are tiny rifts in tone, like the cracks in the South Fork dam, but once opened they expand our awareness that this is an imagined story. The real one will never, truly, be told.

In the end, if In Sunlight, in the Beautiful Garden carries any message, it's that no one but the participants can take the true measure of tragedy. As Cambor quotes Marcus Aurelius in one of the novel's epigrams, "All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered."

It is both the flaw and power of this novel that we leave its pages with this idea indelibly stamped on our minds.

- John Freeman is a freelance writer living in New York City.

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IN SUNLIGHT, IN A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN

By Kathleen Cambor

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23

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