The Turning

The final three stories in the collection all deal with hidden pain in one way or another: what Boner McPharlin is going through is obscured from Jackie both by her own inattention and the police who want Boner silenced; the narrator of “Immunity” is caught up in childhood crushes while Vic Lang’s home life is crumbling; and Vic is too shaken by the unspoken traumas of his childhood and the recent death of his parents to confront the problems in front of him.

Boner McPharlin has been a figure in the background of many stories, and in each of these previous appearances, he has not been given his humanity. Instead, he has served as a symbol of the town’s decline, or of police corruption, or of the dangers lurking down by the docks. “Boner McPharlin’s Moll” focuses on him entirely while reinforcing this outsider’s perspective: even to Jackie, his closest friend, he becomes an idea, a tragic figure, instead of someone who is going through great trauma and needs her help. The ultimate tragedy of Boner McPharlin is that the idea of him becomes more powerful than the frightened, hurt young man.

The bonfire that Boner throws after everyone’s exams offers another idea of him: a triumphant, golden man. The story comparing him to Gatsby is significant, as the opulence of The Great Gatsby is ultimately revealed to be a hollow fraud. Here, though, the triumphant moment when Boner “looked beautiful in the firelight, as glossy and sculpted as the steel carving he’d given [Jackie]” is a moment that clarifies the potential and possibility in Boner’s life, which is quickly snatched away by his involvement with drugs and a corrupt police force (282).

Jackie is troubled by how willingly she believed the official story about Boner. Where the lies begin remains murky throughout Boner’s story, but he spends his life being victimized by the police, and no one, including Jackie, questions the narrative that’s offered: that he’s a loser from a bad home who deserves whatever happens to him. When she realizes that “Whatever it was he was their creature and they broke him,” it’s far too late for her remorse to mean anything (292). The corruption that was ignored by the town had serious human consequences, and Boner and Jackie’s story is emblematic of a reckoning with that cost.

“Immunity” is a story that, on its surface, appears to be mostly concerned with the irony of juxtaposing the narrator’s young infatuation with the tragedy that is about to befall Vic Lang. There is a further irony in the conversation that the two characters have: when Vic recalls the ricocheted bullet that almost struck him, he says “[…] it was kind of like a sign. It made me feel weird. Kind of immune. Death right there beside me and I’m immune” he doesn’t know that his worldview is about to be confirmed (297). The Vic of this story is a little older than he was in “Long, Clear View,” and there’s a clear path between his anxiety-fueled obsession with guns in that story and the boy who now enjoys cadet camp and is starting to feel like he has power in the world. All of that comes crashing down with his sister’s death, and what the narrator remembers as a sad, small moment of lost innocence is, to Vic, a shattering moment where his belief in his own immunity to tragedy prefigures his own survivor’s guilt.

“Defender” picks up this storyline decades later, with Vic in a state of physical and mental collapse and his wife saying to him, “Do you realize that every vivid experience in your life comes from your adolescence?” (302). For Vic, life has been lived in the shadow of loss—first his sister’s death, then his father’s disappearance, and then decades later a repetition of that pattern as his mother succumbed to cancer and his father once again disappeared, this time to die in the outback. Even as he is confronted with his wife’s affair, he is left thinking about helping his father arrest an Aboriginal boy when he was fourteen and realizing that he has spent a lifetime trying to make up for his own sense of complicity in the tragedies of his life and of his hometown.

The ending of the story, in which Vic shoots skeet and marvels at how meaningless holding a gun can be after spending so long being terrified of what he might have become, can be read as a move toward letting go of the guilt and grief that have followed him his whole adult life. For once, Vic is able to put aside his sense of responsibility, and “nothing got hurt” (317). It is left to the reader to decide if this is a point of change for Vic, or if it, like Boner McPharlin’s bonfire before it, is a golden moment, doomed to end.