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  Love, Betrayal, Art and Death.

 Suzi Wizowaty Paints a Picture of a Summer in Vermont

BY EUAN BEAR

eginning with the “something
Bdoesn’t feel right” in the air-

lifting of the central silo of a
round barn from its ancient pasture
into its socket at the “folk art/history”
museum, The Round Barn is- a collec-
tion of uneasiness, of questions and
few answers, of choices and conse-
quences. In her first novel, Suzi
Wizowaty doesn’t take the easy way
out or allow her characters to, either.

Or perhaps the uneasiness
begins even sooner: with the hint that
the bam’s builder had “come to an
untimely end” soon after the death of
the bam’s owner. The interweaving
of the lives of a dozen Vermonters
are framed by the beginning and end
of that story.

There’s Mary Bailey Daly,
one of those practical, down-to-earth,
competent women you’d love to have
for a friend or neighbor. She’s trying
to decide whether she’s really found
“it” — the one true calling or purpose
for her life. “It” wasn’t making sexy

. sandwiches for her husband’s small-

town general store, .but “it” might be
dousing, listening for the currents of

life and water beneath the earth. She; .
struggles toward resolution and self-

forgiveness when her body betrays
her.

There’s Tuesday Bailey, the
director of museum security, in love
with his cousin Mary since she was
six, but never confident enough to act
on it, uneasy with himself, frustrated
by the repeated vandalizing of the

 

Round Barn displays, always a little
awkward, a little late in recognizing
his feelings.

Tuesday’s colleague public
relations director Didi Jamison feels
uneasy about her lover Maude’s
being away for the summer at an
artists’ workshop because of her
growing feelings for Adrian, the local
reporter who is gently pursuing her
through their professional interac-
tions over the sale of some paintings
from the museum’s collection.

Didi’s l8-year-old nephew
is visiting for a few weeks, on the
cusp of becoming, conscious that he
is gay, looking for his first lover,
enrapt with the energy of the Round
Barn and fascinated by — though, yes,
uneasy about — Dean Allen, an eccen-
tric member of _the museum’s board,
possibly brilliant, definitely flawed,
and with uneasy secrets of his own.

Recently widowed Frieda
Maxwell is another member of the
museum’s board, a well known art
collector visiting for the summer ,
from New York with her maybe bom-
again 20-year-old daughter Lucy,
with whom she has a distant and
often antagonistic relationship that‘ is
anythfng but easy. Frieda’s affair with
Charles Hopper, the museum direc-
tor, happens surprisingly easily, and

leads to a re-examination of her life.

I suspect that this descrip-
tion makes the book sound like a
soap opera plot. It is anything but.
How all these threads come together
is the art of the storyteller, and
Wizowaty’s touch is almost always
deft, occasionally compelling, rarely
awkward or obvious.-Her handling of
the push-pull of ordinary people’s
lives, of the small and large questions
the occupy our minds consciously or
not, of the intersections where the
reader knows so much more than any
of the characters individually gives
depth and’ reality to the story that
make The Round Born a book worth
spending time with.

Wizowaty, who lives with
her partner of more than 23 years in
Burlington, said in a phone interview
that the characters came to her “one
by one — and each one led me to the
next.” She started with Mary Bailey

-Daly, a woman experiencing “that

sense of urgency when facing mortal-
ity about whether she’s been living
the ‘right’ sort of life.”

The first-time author con-
tinued, “Each of the characters’ con-

, cems are also concerns of mine: what

is important about life, personal
fears, arriving at the end of life and
making choices. Cancerleads to dif-
ticult choices.” V '

i . It was Tuesday Bailey’s
character that led her to setting the
novel in the fictional equivalent of
the Shelbume Museum. And once the
setting was in place, the other charac-
ters arrived.‘

Asked whether she had '
faced any of the dilemmas in the

book, Wizowaty cited another
Vermont author, David Huddle:
“Someone once asked him whether a
piece he had written was ‘true.’ And
he took one tiny scene, one paragraph
and broke down every phrase and
sentence and explained what was
‘true’ about it and what was inven-
tion. I know what it is like to have
incestuous feelings,” as does one
character in the novel, “but I don’t
know what it’s like to act on them. I
know what it’s like to have the feel-
ings of all my characters in their vari-
ous transgressive situations, but it
may or may not resonate as accurate
for any individual reader.”
Wizowaty has lived in
Vermont with her partner since 1985,
following a well-traveled childhood
(Europe, Connecticut, Texas, New
Jersey, among other locales). She
spent 5 years writing The Round
Barn, fitting it in around teaching at
St. Michael’s College, her associate
directorship of Northern New
England Tradeswomen, and a stint on
the board of the Samara Foundation.
Hardscrabble Books, pub-

lisher of the novel, is the fiction
imprint of University Press of New
England, the publishing arm of 7
Dartmouth, Brandeis, the University
of New Hampshire, Middlebury, and
Tufts. Wizowaty is in good company
at Hardscrabble Books, with the likes

‘of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Chris

Bohjalian, Joe Citro, Dorothy
Cantield Fisher, and Sara Ome
Jewett, among many others.

The hardest part of writing
the novel, she said, “is in the intro-
ductory stages where you’re making

tough decisions about characters, set-
tings and plot that don’t come organi-
cally. And maybe three months down
the road you realize you’ve made
some wrong decisions and you have
to start over from scratch.”

Wizowaty was a little con-
cemed that the LGBTQ community
might say, “This is not a very gay
book.”'But just as there are no true
“gay ghettos” in Vermont, the novel
reflects the matter-of-factness of life
and interactions here. “My experi-
ence is pretty matter of fact. There
are deeper issues here of love and
betrayal — who cares in some way
who you’re sleeping with. When
you’ve been in a community and in a
relationship for so long, life is very
rich.”

And while Didi is in a
long-term partnership with Maude,
“she wouldn’t say she’s a lesbian.
She had relationships with men
‘before, and she’s attracted to this
man. For her, words are very power-
ful. She would be reluctant to hang a
label on herself.” And thus Didi is
not in that difficult place of being a
self-identified “lesbian who occasion-
ally sleeps with men.”

Wizowaty is working on a
new novel, but she’ll take a break to
celebrate the launch of The Round
Barn at a party co-sponsored by the
Shelbume Museum in the Round
Barn on Thursday, September 5 at
5:30. 7