Suffering, Surviving Parents Don’t Let Daughter’s Murder Destroy Them

“Salt of the Earth: One Family’s Journey Through the Violent American Landscape” By Jack Olsen (St. Martin’s Press, 376 pages. $24.95)

The reader’s anxiety mounts as Jack Olsen fills in the background of the horrifying story he reports in “Salt of the Earth: One Family’s Journey Through the Violent American Landscape.”

For instance, Fontana, Calif. - the hometown of Elaine Mayzsak Gere, the story’s protagonist - is described as a “quicksand swamp” from which its inhabitants can never escape.

Elaine’s father, Big Ed Mayzsak, sinks into alcoholism after cholera wipes out the entire flock of his prospering turkey farm. At one point, Elaine hits him in the head with a baseball bat to stop him from choking her mother.

Joe Gere, the man Elaine will marry, tells her at their first meeting that he’s a pre-med student at Berkeley when in fact he has just finished his junior year at Fontana High. Of that meeting, Olsen writes, “It was the beginning of a friendship that would last until violent death.”

Joe’s mother, too, is an alcoholic, and by the time Joe and Elaine marry two and a half years later, Joe is clearly headed in the same direction.

Joe and Elaine’s first child, Brenda, suffers from an inexplicable fearfulness. For a grade-school assignment, she writes: “I would like to invent a different kind of car. It would be totally invisible… . If your a police officer it would be an advantage because you could see if any body was a murderer and had a dead body in the trunk of the car.”

About the grown-ups’ puzzled reaction to Brenda’s fantasy, Olsen comments, “Neither her parents nor her teachers considered the possibility that she was prescient.”

In short, the characters in “Salt of the Earth” are clearly doomed. So why would a reader subject himself to their suffering? You do so because, although the cards are stacked against them, Joe and Elaine are appealingly gritty people who keep trying to bounce back whenever they get knocked down.

And you keep reading out of a sense of pity and fear: pity because the Geres finally suffer the most undeserved misfortune possible, and fear because what happens to them could too easily befall anyone.

What the Geres go through is the loss of a child to the random violence of a psychopath. The case is actual, of course, like Olsen’s many previous true-crime reports, among them “Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell,” “Charmer: A Ladies’ Man and His Victims,” “The Misbegotten Son: A Serial Killer and His Victims” and “Predator: Rape, Madness and Injustice in Seattle.”

His painstaking research and wholly objective reporting - with never a scene fictionalized - make you share the agony of the Geres’ experience, their hope, their dread, their self-delusion, their rage, their resistance to the truth and, at long last, the awful aftermath of what happened to them.

More impressive still, Olsen, a former bureau chief for Time magazine, does not simply dwell on the terrifying details of the case.

Unobtrusively, he fills in background that allows one to see what is peculiarly American about the Geres’ tragedy: the strain of different immigrant cultures colliding with one another; the complex pathology of hypermasculinity and spousal abuse, and the sometimes destructive tug-of-war between opponents and proponents of the rights of suspected criminals.

Yet balanced with all the pain of the Geres’ experience is the heartening sense of community their troubles inspired. People came from miles away to try to help them. Others identified so strongly that their own lives were damaged.

Paradoxically, the crime’s terrible violation of community serves to renew one’s faith in the possibility of community.

Olsen’s handling of his story is not flawless. One hesitates to raise questions of craft in the face of so much suffering, but the fact remains that several tantalizing loose ends are left dangling.

And while the pain of not knowing what had happened to their child was at the heart of what the Geres went through, nevertheless in Olsen’s treatment, the details that follow the initial disaster seem at times unnecessarily drawn out.

Still, Olsen’s narrative pulls you along irresistibly. And what redeems it from crushing grimness is Elaine Mayzsak Gere’s determination never to give up, if only for the sake of her surviving children. In this respect she re-enacts another American myth, that of the indomitable frontierswoman who refuses to give up her homestead.

At the same time, she evokes something more universal, which is expressed by the haunting quotation from Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” that Olsen recalls in his epigraph:

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”