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Terri Jentz's "Strange Piece of Paradise" (Farrar, Straus, 535 pages, $27) is a breathtaking memoir that deserves enshrinement on the shelf of essential books about the American West, worthy of a place beside Norman Mailer's classic account, "The Executioner's Song." The two weighty volumes are similar -- both delve deeply into horrific crimes, but also provide even more compelling portraits of hardscrabble life in the small towns in the West. The two books even spring from the same time.
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, the subject of Mailer's masterpiece, was executed on January 19, 1977. Five months and five days later, two Yale students on a bike ride across the country were attacked by a stranger as they camped overnight at Cline Falls State Park in Oregon. The attacker ran his pickup over the students in their tent, then stepped from the vehicle and set upon them with an ax.
Both women miraculously survived, just barely, their lives forever altered. No arrest in the case was made. Survivor Terri Jentz recounts her attempts to find out why in her investigative memoir. The first-time book writer has crafted a riveting pilgrimage from horror to hope and healing, but one with no easy answers or satisfying justice, an inspiring and powerful testament to what can happen when someone refuses to live life as a victim.
This was not how it was for Jentz in the first decade after the savage attack on her and her biking partner shocked the nation on the "CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite" and in many newspapers. She pressed on with her life, continuing at Yale after only a semester away, pursuing a career in New York City, sharing her story and her wounds with a kind of sardonic humor that suggested everything was fine and there was no need for counseling or anything of the sort.
But inside Jentz was a different person altogether, someone racked by "black moods and flashes of rage," by recurrent nightmares, fears and doubts.
Jentz finally immersed herself in counseling and "therapies of every stripe," and to her considerable benefit, began work as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. But she realized that her ability to tell the stories of others was hampered because she had never really set down her own.
She drove back into Oregon in 1992 with much trepidation, since, as she writes, "it meant a darkening state of mind, an alien place where I knew hardly anyone, a malevolent landscape that would surely trigger an incendiary blast of memory."
But Jentz perseveres during repeated expeditions to central Oregon, knocking on doors unannounced, the police report of the attack in hand, plumbing memories and suspicions, sometimes on her own, sometimes aided by two relentless crime victim advocates from Portland, as well as the Oregon State Police whose initial investigation of the case was cursory at best.
One jailed suspect soon emerges, then is eliminated, then all focus turns on another man who seems to fit Jentz's memory of her attacker as being a "meticulous cowboy." She saw his torso on the night of the attack, not his face in the darkness.
Jentz is shocked to discover that this Redmond, Ore., man, whom she renames "Dirk Duran" in her book, was widely believed in town to have been the attacker. As Jentz painstakingly works through interviews with Duran's various girlfriends, ex-wives and associates, a chilling portrait emerges of a violent abuser of women who has long managed to avoid serious legal penalties for his beatings and worse offenses.
Jentz vows to change that, but she is hampered by the fact that the Oregon statute of limitations was three years for attempted murder (a law that she helps change, but without retroactive benefit). Still, the circumstantial case that Jentz accumulates against Duran is massive and damning, often revealed in startling developments and shocking plot twists as the book crescendos toward its close.
"Strange Piece of Paradise" is compelling in countless ways, as a whodunit, as a profile in courage, as a case of bungled police work, as a scary warning to permissive parents, as a portrait of a community that is devastated and haunted by a crime, but embraces a returning victim and alters her perceptions.
This memoir is not without a few minor flaws, including a time-jumping chronology more complicated than needed.
Still, Jentz has done a masterful job in so many ways that her book is utterly unforgettable.
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