The ultimate violation

As soon as the rape began, and even more intensely afterward, Raine wondered about how his failure to save Catherine was going to reflect on him. The Raine brothers were lucky to meet a New Orleans cop who, shortly after the attack, told them, "Lemme set you straight on somethin'. Ya'll alive, right? You got away from him. So y'all done the right thing. And you're going to have to remember that every time someone asks you what went on." That's the voice of someone who knows all too well where heroics in the face of violent crime can lead. (In fact, Catherine had a gun, given to her by her father, in her purse that her attacker found. She had been too terrified to make a move for it.) But despite the cop's advice, Raine says, "sitting with my brother and Alex ... I grow more and more convinced that Catherine's father and my father and every other man who will ever hear about this will look at me and my brother and will wonder how we could ever have let this happen."

In fact, Raine did try to intervene to prevent the rape; the attacker kicked him in the balls and then pointed a gun at his head. Had he continued, he would likely have gotten himself or Catherine killed. But he is all too right about the reactions of Catherine's father and his own. Raine's macho, working-class father (a man of whom he was -- often cruelly -- embarrassed) reacted to the news by asking, "How we gonna live this one down?" And Catherine's father, informed of the rape by Raine's mother (who had taken the girl under her wing and spoke for her when she couldn't face her family) asked her "What kind of men are they?" It doesn't help Raine's ego that his assailant is captured later that night by a woman whose apartment he breaks into. (Telling him she's going to get him a beer, the woman takes a can she had left in the freezer and cold cocks him with it.)

There are no conclusions drawn in "Where the River Bends," no theorizing on the causes of violence or the pathology of rape. Raine sticks to the events -- the capture and trial of Catherine's attacker, how memories of the event followed him during his student year in Italy, the strain and eventual healing of his friendship with Catherine. This just-the-facts focus works to give us a larger sense of this event than all of Brison's theorizing can. Raine's writing on Catherine, never pretending to see inside her head, is a fine example of intelligent, sympathetic observation. And his description of her experience being cross-examined is one of the most devastating I've encountered of the indignities rape victims are subjected to on the stand.

Brison (whose own trial experience seems relatively free of that abuse) could use Catherine's experience as an illustration of her contention that rape victims need to be given some special consideration by the law. The rapist's lawyer was a public defender named Alain Dupuy, now a New Orleans criminal-court judge. Maybe it was the mountain of evidence against the accused -- multiple witness identification, not just from the rape but other crimes he committed that night, the fact that he had been caught at the scene of another crime -- that led to Dupuy's desperate tactics.

He began by attacking Raine's brother as a privileged rich kid because he was on a scholarship (that's typical of his "logic") and then set about attacking Catherine, asking why a young woman would be alone in a park with only male friends (i.e., she was asking for it), asking her to describe what sexual positions she was forced into. Most of the questions were interrupted by the D.A.'s sustained objections, but Dupuy was so obviously out to humiliate the woman that it's impossible to read these passages without thinking that the old shibboleths about rape will never go away.

In much of the book, Raine tries to deal with his own prejudices. He had grown up with a mother who resisted and criticized his father's racism. That doesn't keep his hackles from rising when he first sees his black assailant approaching him and his friends in the park. (To be fair to Raine, anyone in the shabby, drugged state this man was in might have set alarm bells ringing.) He is obviously conflicted on questions of class. While he recognizes his prejudices and shame toward his own father, that doesn't prevent those prejudices from coloring his descriptions of the man. And his writing about the feisty, working-class woman who captured his assailant turns her into a trailer-trash caricature (he even includes his brother's description of her court outfits as "tart wear"), though she never shows anything but sympathy for what he and his friends went through.

But "Where the River Bends" also shows an ability to recognize the ways people can grow and change, particularly Catherine's father, who endures his own later encounter with violence. And Raine's final sentence -- "What is written here can never be complete because the mystery at its core can never be explained" -- shows an admirable resistance toward ideology and generalization. Brison, for all her good intentions, writes to shut down the vagaries of experience, to replace them with tinned certainties. It's not a reduction Raine has any use for.

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