Early on in Scott Nadelson’s trenchant, deeply moving new novel, Trust Me, an adolescent girl named Skye wonders if she loves her father, Lewis.
“Right now I do,” she admits to herself, though she fears she can’t take loving him for granted. And that’s, well … unnerving.
The book is composed of fifty-two vignettes that alternate between Skye’s perspective and Lewis’s. Skye spends weekends with her father, who is newly divorced, in an A‑frame cabin in the untamed wilderness of Western Oregon, where “almost everything he does seems strange to her.”
When it comes to his daughter, Lewis seems similarly mystified. She’s twelve — or, as she tells him, “Twelve-and-a-half for crying out loud” — a braces-wearing seventh grader with a permanent pout that reminds him, disconcertingly, of his ex-wife, Veronica. He’s always called her Silly — “Sills” for short — a nickname that must be wearing painfully thin for a girl preoccupied with the middle school pecking order and imagining her first kiss.
Skye spends the school week with her mother in Portland, then drives with her father each weekend forty-five minutes to the cabin in the foothills of the Cascade mountains. In this rustic, self-contained universe, where there is no TV or internet service, they pass the time fly fishing, playing endless games of Risk, and hunting oyster mushrooms and king bolete, the prize of the woods.
Lewis is a hapless outsider, “a little New Jersey Jew playing man of the mountains.” (Veronica, his ex, grew up outside Portland.) One Sunday, when a trio of ATV riders roars up the gravel road, he becomes acutely aware of the ways in which he is different. “ … his hair darker and curlier, his nose longer and bumpier, his hands grabbing stacks of coins.” Sills, studying for a test, asks him to restore the peace. But all Lewis can think about is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Growing up, Lewis lived in a mostly Italian and Irish Catholic neighborhood in North Jersey. His family wasn’t Jewishly observant; they lit Hanukkah candles for two nights before forgetting the next six. Lewis is unnerved by his daughter’s glee at cutting down a Christmas tree not because of Jewish guilt, but because “he just finds it senseless to cut down a perfectly healthy tree.” When he tells Sills as much, he ruins the ritual for her. But her disappointment barely registers.
“She’s also a Jew after all — in the eyes of Nazis, at least if not the Orthodox,” Lewis thinks. “Shouldn’t she have some sense of the world as flawed and compromised, even in its joyful moments?”
There are no car chases, no explosions or gunfights or UFOs glimpsed above treetops. And yet as the novel progresses, tension begins to build, quietly at first, and then in a cascade. Readers are left wondering whether Sills will continue to love a dad who’s reeling from what he calls “the dull throb of loss that never quite dissipates.”
Josh Rolnick is a short story writer, author of the collection Pulp and Paper, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. He is a faculty lecturer at the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program, an instructor at Sackett Street Writers, and fiction editor at Paper Brigade, the literary annual of the Jewish Book Council.
